OneDrive or OneDrive for Business?

Isn’t it confusing? What are the differences? Are they the same but not completly the same?

OneDrive is for consumers, and it is free of charge. It is also a Microsoft Account and will be used as your login Name and Password if Your running Windows 8/8.1/10. It doesn’t cost money, but nothing is really free so in some way we are the Product beeing sold when using the service. OneDrive also has integrations with Office Online (earlier Office Web Apps) and some Instant messaging services like Facebook Messanger.

OneDrive for Business is part of the Office 365 Services, and cost money. Therefore we get SLAs garanteeing uptime and we also get the integrations with other Office 365 Services. Like Exchange Online, Office Online, Yammer and Azure Rights Management.

Under the Hood these are two different services aswell, because OneDrive for Business is based on SharePoint Online and therefore follows the rules and limits of SPO to a certain grade.

OneDrive for Consumers are based on Hotmail/Outlook and Microsoft Account platforms.

Additional to that OneDrive for Business follows the infrastructure behind Office 365 and will keep the Access safe and controlled by Your IT Administrators.

In terms of use, OneDrive is Your personal private area for family photos (integrates well with Smartphones) and other none work related files. OneDrive for Business is the private work related area, former known as Your Home Folder (or H:). This is often a mess, but we have allways had them. Some customers wants to keep information open and only uses areas like SharePoint, because they don’t see the need of not sharing within the Company. And I can see how that is benficial, but OneDrive for Business is also a way of keeping Your users from using OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Disc and other services we don’t have controll over.

Consumer services drives Business services, so rather then not allowing the users, make sure they have a controlled alternative services. Delivered to them by the IT Department.

But for finished documents and project documents, we keep them in SharePoint to make them highly available for other Project members and employees.

To round it up I also wanne add that OneDrive for Business integrates with Exchange Online, so from Our Outlook App (earlier owa) we can choose to send invitations to attachment we store in OneDrive for Business. Usefull for larger files not suited for Email and we gain the ability to withdraw the Access later, as well as only giving them Viewer rights. This is easier and sometimes better then giving externals Access to a SharePoint Site.

Hopefully this cleared it up and we meet Skype for Business later in 2015, we need to be finished with OneDrive confused with OneDrive for Business 😉