New UI for OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Groups is here

As you might know that Microsoft has recently started to deploy the New Onedrive for business to its Office 365 tenants. The new experience has also been rolled-out to Office 365 Groups, which resides within the window of OneDrive for business (there are other ways to get to Office 365 groups though).

The official announcement that came in last week is below :

“On October 13, 2015 Microsoft confirmed that the new UI for Onedrive for business and Office 365 Groups has been deployed to first release tenants.This new experience is aligned with the new visual look of OneDrive for Business, which gives users a new clean simple browser experience. See details published by Microsoft here.”

Now, lets look at what has actually changed.

1. First, the UI is changed for better user experience.

Following is the Old OneDrive for Business UI :

New OneDrive for Business UI looks like below :

New UI also has Sort and switch to Tiles option aligned to the right :

2. A link “Return to Classic” is now available in bottom left. The link to Return to the new UI is not aviable though. You gotta refresh the Onedrive to switch back.

3. A New ECB bar also known as Command bar pops-up when a Document is selected.

The items in Command bar are contextually aware, that means the items change if multiple items are selected. See below :

The new command bar and views also have a responsive design that dynamically adapts the layout to the available screen

4. The callout or Preview pane is actually moved to the right. Users can click on Details button to display the preview pane.

In addition to the Preview, the above pane file also displays who it is shared with, recent activity on the file (by you or others) and other important metadata.

5. Finally, not so important, a pop up recycle bin appears inline rather than on a new page of OneDrive for business.