OneDrive Progressive Web App
If you have visited OneDrive for Business recently in your web browser, you may have seen a message prompting you to install the new desktop app. New desktop app? But isn’t OneDrive built into Windows? Yes, that hasn’t changed. You can still add your Microsoft account or Office 365 account to Windows, sync and get files on demand in File Explorer. Or install the OneDrive sync app for Mac.
Then what is this new OneDrive desktop app?
I was curious and clicked the message. I was expecting to be taken to a landing page that told me about the new OneDrive desktop app, with a download link somewhere to try it. But instead, a new window opened and loaded the same OneDrive window I had opened in my web browser. But the new window didn’t look like a browser window and it had a OneDrive icon on my taskbar.
I had just been Rick-Enrolled into using OneDrive as a Progressive Web App (PWA).
Some of our favourite websites can be installed as separate applications on our computers. The website works the same way that it does in your browser, but with some advantages. It loads faster. The website is more responsive when you use it. Most of the websites installed as Progressive Web Apps even work when you are offline.
What advantages are there to installing OneDrive as a PWA? The fullest experience of OneDrive is from a web browser.
- Access your files in the cloud, synced with your devices. Camera roll. Documents, Pictures, Desktop folders.
- View files you have shared and files shared with you
- Navigate to files in your Teams and team sites
- Manage shared files, sharing links and access
However, you won’t be able to use the Progressive Web App is sync and browse synced files while offline.
More people use OneDrive from within Windows and File Explorer. They sync files, use Files-on-Demand and the Shortcut feature to work with their OneDrive files. They share files stored in their OneDrive directly from applications like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. In short, the adoption of the OneDrive web application is low and people aren’t benefitting from it’s powerful features.
Installing the OneDrive web app on our desktops might help with OneDrive web feature adoption. Though you might need to Rick-enrol people to get them started.