If you’re an Office 365 user on the Small Business plan or higher then you may have noticed that you get access to something called SkyDrive Pro – when using the web interface it is listed as SkyDrive which may lead you to think that SkyDrive Pro and SkyDrive are related or perhaps the same thing.
To put it simply, they are not but you could be forgiven for thinking they are the same given their similarities.
SkyDrive is a consumer level offering where you can stash your documents, photos and other files and have them accessible from other devices. These days, accounts will offer 7GB of space but if you’ve been around a while and you’ve been vigilant you might have a 25GB SkyDrive account. You can share content in your SkyDrive with others as you see fit and also use the SkyDrive client to sync files to your computer(s).
On the other hand, SkyDrive Pro is a business level offering where you can stash you documents, photos and other files. The key difference here is that SkyDrive Pro is really SharePoint in disguise, specifically a personal document library. You can share documents with co-workers or others outside the business and you can use the SkyDrive Pro client (included with Microsoft Office 2013) to sync files to your computer(s).
Throw into the mix that consumer level Office 365 offerings which hook into the vanilla SkyDrive (and provide a storage boost for the main Microsoft account associated with the Office 365 subscription) and heads are spinning everywhere.
Essentially, the back end stuff is completely different but a lot of the key functionality is similar between SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro.
That said, given the fiasco over the SkyDrive name I hope Microsoft takes the opportunity to perhaps make it clearer that these services are indeed different.
Follow Us!