SkyDrive Updates Interface, Adds Better Sharing

The most obvious appeal of Microsoft’s SkyDrive service is the generous 25GB of free storage it offers, but it’s also handy for sharing and collaborating on files. A bunch of updates to the service this week have made file handling and sharing easier.

An HTML5-driven update has made the interface for SkyDrive a lot more like Windows Explorer, including options to select multiple files and to use right-click options to select relevant operations. It’s a slick and efficient interface, and it works nicely in Chrome and Firefox (as well as IE, which you’d expect). Uploading files is handled via a new HTML5-widget which can handle drag-and-drop.

The Share dialogue now offers options to publish content to Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace (Twitter is a pretty glaring omission), as well as sending via email. You can invite people to collaborate on editing a file even if they don’t have a Windows Live ID. There’s also a useful ‘Docs shared with you’ link, making it faster to hunt down stuff you’re meant to collaborate on.

Hit the blog post below for a lengthy run-down of the changes.

Inside Windows Live