Microsoft's SkyDrive now stores 1B documents

Computerworld - Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service now has one billion Office documents stored in it, the company announced today.

While a billion may seem like a lot, the most popular consumer cloud storage service, Dropbox, has more than 100,000,000 users. According to the company's information site, users save one billion files to Dropbox every 24 hours.

But along with Microsoft's upload milestone news, Microsoft said it has added new features to SkyDrive that will make it easier to share content with others.

"Recently, we reached a big milestone; our customers are now storing over a billion Office documents on SkyDrive! We're really excited about the feedback we've seen around the new version of Office and the deep integration of SkyDrive," Sarah Filman, a Lead Program Manager on SkyDrive, wrote in a blog post.

Last week, Microsoft launched Office 365 Home Premium, which is tightly integrated with SkyDrive, offering an icon for saving and sharing documents through the cloud service.

Today, Microsoft announced a new feature in SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps that offers an easier way to share and edit documents by not requiring users to sign in with their Microsoft account.

In a feature similar to what other cloud storage vendors such as Dropbox already offer, Microsoft now gives users an edit link that can be used to give anyone access to a document at the same time.

Sharing a document link through SkyDrive

"One piece of feedback we've consistently heard, especially from students, is that our current SkyDrive edit links can be frustrating for recipients when they find that they need to sign in or sign up for a Microsoft account just to make a quick edit to the document," Filman wrote.

Document originators can also limit who can view and edit their content by inviting specific people via their email addresses and checking the "Require user to sign-in" check box.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at  @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

See more by Lucas Mearian on Computerworld.com.

Read more about Cloud Storage in Computerworld's Cloud Storage Topic Center.