Microsoft Further Integrates OWA, OneDrive for Business in Office 365

If you use Outlook.com, you may know that you can send very large attachments through this webmail provider by using the OneDrive cloud storage service implicitly on the backend. This week, Microsoft has begun offering this same capability to Office 365 business customers. So you can now use OneDrive for Business (ODB) to send very large attachments through OWA, Office 365's client on the web, iOS and Android.

And as with Outlook.com/OneDrive, sending files through OWA/ODB will enable a form of document consistency, since you're sharing a link to a web-based file instead of having recipients make and edit different versions of the file. If you share an ODB-based Word document, for example, each recipient will edit the same document—and the same document version—in the web.

Here are the two key changes, as outlined by Microsoft.

When you send an email in OWA, you can easily insert a link to the file on your OneDrive for Business cloud drive instead of attaching the file itself.

When you send an attachment from your computer or device you can now automatically upload the file to your OneDrive for Business cloud drive and share the file as a link to that location. Here's how it looks from the web:

These features will work in OWA for the web, iPhone, iPad and Android phone. They will not work, not at first, in Microsoft Outlook, however. It's not clear whether these changes will be added to Outlook 2013 or a future version. Also, while these are changes are already rolling out to some Office 365 customers, they won't be fully available until November.