A few months ago, we shared a few challenges that customers have with today’s personal cloud storage services. College students in particular have unique needs that today’s services do not satisfy. While we continue to improve SkyDrive to meet their needs, today’s SkyDrive can already help students work together more efficiently. To spread the word, we’re showcasing what students can do with SkyDrive and Office, and we’re sponsoring a $50K Collaboration Challenge for students at 10 universities across the U.S. who are participating in business plan competitions.

This blog post includes a few power tips and FAQs to help you get the most out of SkyDrive and Office for full-powered collaboration.

The problem

Let’s say you're working on a business plan competition (or another group project) with a few other people. Your teammates are across campus, across town or even across the country. Some use PCs. Some use Macs. You want to put your best foot forward with a compelling pitch deck, smart business plan, and sound financial analysis. How can you easily work together and create something great?

You could use web-based apps like Google Docs. While they may work well for simple tasks, they may not have the features you need to create professional documents. You can also have formatting issues when you move between these apps and Office. You could also use a “file cloud” like Dropbox, but these tools aren’t really designed for collaboration, and they don’t let you work simultaneously with others on a document.

Faced with these choices, many people decide to work independently and email files back and forth. This makes it hard to know if you’re working on the latest version of a document, and sometimes you can run into attachment limits. It also can take a lot of time to piece together different Word documents or PowerPoint presentations from multiple email messages.

How SkyDrive can help

With SkyDrive, you have a better option. You can store all your files in one place, so everyone can access the latest version. You can also use free Office Web Apps for basic editing from any browser.

But what most people don’t know is that SkyDrive and Office Web Apps integrate with the Office apps installed on your PC or Mac so you can work together on documents in the cloud right from your desktop apps. With the right setup, you can work together on a Word doc or PowerPoint presentation with your teammates at the same time.

Working this way, your team gets the powerful authoring and formatting tools that you’re used to in Microsoft Office, while also being able to take advantage of cloud-based collaboration. Everyone can work from the latest version and even work on the doc at the same time. You won’t have to convert your document into a different format that could lead to formatting problems.

Also with tools like OneNote Web App and PowerPoint embedding, SkyDrive can save your team time by being the one place to brainstorm, create, collaborate and publish.

Power tips

Here are 7 tips for full-powered collaboration in the cloud—across PCs and Macs. Please also see the FAQs at the end of the blog post.

Tip 1: Add SkyDrive.com to your desktop for quick access

If you have a PC, you can pin SkyDrive to your Windows 7 taskbar using Internet Explorer 9 for quick access to files and sharing options.

Add SkyDrive.com to your desktop for quick access

If you have a Mac, you have a few different options. Apps like Fluid or Automator bring SkyDrive to your Dock along with a nice SkyDrive icon (download one here). However, using these can interfere with the plugin that SkyDrive needs to open Office apps on your Mac (see the FAQ below). We recommend a simpler approach:

  1. Use Safari or Firefox to sign in to SkyDrive.com. (Select “Keep me signed in”)
  2. Drag the SkyDrive icon in your browser address bar down to the right side of your Dock.

Use Safari or Firefox to sign in to SkyDrive.com

Drag the SkyDrive icon

Tip 2: Create one space for the team that’s easy to find

There are two ways to create a shared space for your team on SkyDrive. You can create a SkyDrive group or you can share a SkyDrive folder with team members.

With the latest sharing updates, sharing a folder is a better option for many projects, particularly ones that are short-lived. Now you can go from creation, to collaboration, to publishing—keeping your files in one place without extra versions.

Use SkyDrive to keep your files in one place without extra versions

Choose who you want to share files with

To get the most out of the experience:

  • Use subfolders to keep all your group’s files organized in one shared folder. If you organize files this way, your teammates can easily access all files by clicking the parent folder within the “Shared” section of their SkyDrive.

Use subfolders to keep your files organized

  • Set permissions individually for files or subfolders, if, for example, you need others outside your team to contribute to a part of the project. Once you’re ready to share your project with the world, you can share any file—like your pitch deck—with others. You can even feature it on your blog, by selecting any file on SkyDrive and clicking Embed.

Click Embed to feature your deck on your blog

Tip 3: Capture meeting notes, brainstorming notes, and to-do’s more efficiently than email

SkyDrive works with OneNote so you can organize notes and brainstorm in a virtual notebook that’s shared with your entire team. Instead of sifting through old email threads, everyone can get up to speed on the project history in one place.

To start, create a new notebook using OneNote Web App in your shared folder. Then, everyone on your team can easily access it from that folder.

Create a new notebook

OneNote Web App works great across Mac and PC, and you can easily access it along with the rest of your shared files from your SkyDrive bookmark. If you have OneNote 2010 on your PC, sync your notebook locally to work offline and use additional features like screenshot capture, inking and more. You can also access your notes on a Windows Phone, iPhone, or iPad.

OneNote Web App works great across Mac and PC

Tip 4: Access SkyDrive docs right from Word, Excel or PowerPoint—online or offline

Once your team is up and running, you may find that you’re working on a couple of documents frequently, such as your pitch deck or financial model.

With Windows 7 and Office 2010, if you’ve opened these documents from SkyDrive at least once, you can then pin them to your taskbar just by right-clicking Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Then you can edit and automatically save changes back to the cloud.

Also, within Word, Excel or Word 2010, you can use the File/Recent menu for even more pinning options. You can pin additional files, as well as the entire shared folder.

Lots of pinning options let you pin files or shared folders

If you have a Mac, you can access any SkyDrive document that you’ve opened recently from the File/Open Recent menu of the Office app that you’re using.

Open a recent doc on a Mac

And if you’re offline, you may still be able to access your SkyDrive docs. On your PC, run Microsoft Office 2010 Upload Center from the start menu or from the tray. You can view recently uploaded files that have been cached for offline use. On the Mac, access Upload Center through the Finder.

Access your SkyDrive docs when you are not online on a PC

Access your SkyDrive docs when you are not online on a Mac

Tip 5: Use Word co-authoring to ensure your team’s plan flows nicely

If you and your teammates use Word 2010 for PC, Word 2011 for Mac, or Word Web App, you can work together on the same Word document on SkyDrive at the same time. If your team’s style is to “divide and conquer”, co-authoring will help your team see the paper as it comes together, so each person can make sure that their piece fits with what the rest of the team is doing. You can even see everyone who is working on a doc at a given time.

You can see everyone who is working on a doc

To get the most out of the experience, use Track Changes for edit rounds. Track Changes lets you review any change your teammates make to the document. If you turn on Track Changes, keep in mind that you won’t be able to edit the document using Word Web App until you accept all of the changes.

Tip 6: Avoid last minute PowerPoint assembly with co-authoring

SkyDrive works with PowerPoint 2010 for PC and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac so you can work together on the same PowerPoint at the same time. This can be a huge time saver compared to emailing around individual slides, and it lets you keep your formatting consistent. To take advantage of this:

  • Populate your presentation with blank slides that chart your presentation’s “story.”
  • Assign slides to members of your team, so each person knows exactly where to contribute. As each person periodically saves their presentation, they’ll automatically get updates from the rest of the team.
  • Keep Excel and PowerPoint files together and linked on SkyDrive. Then, if one member of your team updates the Excel workbook, you can automatically refresh the corresponding chart in PowerPoint—without having to provide any additional copying, pasting, or emailing.

Link Excel and SkyDrive docs

Tip 7: Use version history to avoid disasters

Version history keeps your previous drafts

For Office documents that you edit online or on your PC, SkyDrive keeps track of different versions automatically, storing the last 25 versions online. These additional versions do not count towards your storage limit on SkyDrive.

Versions are really helpful because they can recover your file from a bad change, and they also let you go back in time and see how far your project has come!

Click on any Office document to view its version history, and then choose to restore or delete any version. If you decide to restore a previous version, SkyDrive will not overwrite your current file. Instead, it will take a snapshot of your current file and save it as another version.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Hotmail account to use SkyDrive?

No. If you use Gmail or another account, you can easily sign up for an account at SkyDrive.com using your existing email address. Once you sign up, you can add contacts from Gmail or Facebook for easier sharing.

Sign up for SkyDrive using an existing address

Why can’t I open docs from SkyDrive.com using Office apps on my PC or Mac?

We’re working hard to make sure SkyDrive and Office Web Apps are built using HTML5 and modern web standards to work across browsers.

But to be able to open cloud-based files with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on your PC or Mac, SkyDrive requires a browser plugin that’s currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC or Safari and Firefox on the Mac. If you use these browsers and still have issues opening docs, here’s a quick way to troubleshoot the problem:

  1. Check if a plugin named “SharePoint…” or “Microsoft Office 2010…” is installed and enabled. If you have a recent version of Office, the plugin should already be installed. Here’s how to check for add-ins on IE8, IE9, Firefox and Safari.
    If you don’t see the plugin, install a free trial of Office 2010 or Office 2011. This will automatically add the plugin to your browser. You may also need to install the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant on Windows.
  2. If you use OS X Lion or Snow Leopard, setup Safari to run in 32-bit mode.

NOTE: You need Office 2003, 2007 or 2010 on the PC or Office 2008 or Office 2011 on the Mac to open files from SkyDrive.

I can’t upload more than one file at a time to SkyDrive. What’s wrong?

You should be able to. If you have Silverlight installed and use IE or Safari for Mac, you can upload up to 200 files at the same time. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you can drag and drop multiple files from your desktop to the folder of your choice.

Listening to your feedback

We hope these tips are helpful for any type of group work. And for students participating in a business plan competition, we encourage your team to try SkyDrive, check out these helpful tips / templates from Guy Kawasaki, and enter our $50K Collaboration Challenge.

We’re constantly working to improve the SkyDrive experience. We’d love to hear from you, whether you have additional tips, suggestions or just want to share with us something that you’ve created using SkyDrive.

Anand Babu

Product Manager

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