Microsoft Also Announces OneDrive for Business

Early this morning, I broke the news about Microsoft finally settling on a replacement name for SkyDrive. Well, they've been settled on it for a while, but the tidbits of it becoming official filtered out in the wee business hours. If you missed the announcement, see here: SkyDrive to become OneDrive.

Now, that the news is officially official, Microsoft has gone even further to help declare a difference in the consumer and business versions of the newly brandished OneDrive.

As you probably already know, there have been two different versions of SkyDrive: SkyDrive (consumer version) and SkyDrive Pro (business version as part of Office 365). Since Microsoft is changing the name of SkyDrive (because of proposed litigations from the British Sky Broadcasting Group in 2013), it also has to apply the same delineation to the two different versions of its Cloud-based storage service.

On the Office blog today, Microsoft has communicated the separation. SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro will now become OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

One extra important piece answered in the blog post is sure to help eliminate the torrent of questions around compatibility between SkyDrive and OneDrive. Microsoft says…

That's good to know. I'm sure there will be some significant DNS manipulation to accomplish the task. Most of the DNS structure looks to be in place already. If you type onedrive.live.com into a web browser now, you will automatically end up at the skydrive.live.com location.

There's no mention, so far, as to a date when the OneDrive name will be replace SkyDrive completely, or when the change might make it into Windows 8.x. Rumor suggest that Microsoft may be planning the change with the release of Windows 8.1 Update 1 in April 2014.

It's also not clear if the number of existing Windows Store apps that utilize SkyDrive for synching and storage will need to be modified to work completely after the change. Developers will probably hear all about it at BUILD, but let's hope there's preparation before then.