Microsoft’s SkyDrive gets new unified sharing view, HTML5 swiping gestures, drag and drop options

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a slew of improvements to SkyDrive.com, noting they are being released today and should be available for all “soon.” The new features include a new unified view showing you how each of your files is shared, HTML5 gestures for touch devices, and more drag-and-drop capabilities for managing your files, photos, and documents.

First up, let’s look at this new integrated view for sharing permissions. Since SkyDrive lets you share your files via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just via a link, Microsoft has noticed people are often using more than one of these at a time. To simply things, the company has added a unified view that shows all sharing-related info and tasks on a single screen:

To see the new view you’ll need to first select a document and click Share in the command bar. As you can see on the left-hand side under Permissions, you can further select a given share and change the access type to the document in question (view only or edit) or remove it altogether.

This may not seem very intuitive at first. As people use the feature more and more, however, we assume (and Microsoft probably does too) they’ll realize that the Share button not only lets them see all the different ways they can do so, but also who already has access to a given file.

As for touch devices, Microsoft has made it so that you can now select an item or multiple items by swiping on them left or right. This is similar to how Windows 8 works (repeating the touch gesture will deselect the item or items):

Last but not least, Microsoft has improved drag-and-drop support. In addition to being able to drag and drop files into your SkyDrive, you can now move files to anywhere in the hierarchy of your SkyDrive by using the bread crumb bar as the target:

Microsoft is iterating SkyDrive on a frequent basis in order to stay competitive with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive. It isn’t an easy fight.

See also – Dropbox’s new Modern UI Windows 8 app finally arrives in the Windows Store and Gmail now lets you insert up to 10GB of Google Drive files directly into an email

Image credit: Asif Akbar