The SkyDrive development team have announced, via a shared Word document of course, several new updates to Microsoft's cloud document and storage service. The maximum upload limit has been increased to 300MB, and a short domain, sdrv.ms, has been introduced to facilitate sharing files via Twitter. Most importantly though is that SkyDrive now supports editing of Open Document Format (ODF) files. This is significant because an increasing amount of government departments around the world are mandating the use of open formats.

SkyDrive supports ODF (mostly).

Supporting ODF means that SkyDrive is a step closer to matching the functionality of both the desktop Office software, and its online competitor Google Docs. In our testing, ODF compatibility was hit-and-miss though.

Uploading an ODT file.

For Windows Phone 7, ODF files are displayed within the Office application's SkyDrive file list, sans an identifying icon. Viewing is handled by launching the mobile web version of SkyDrive in Internet Explorer, rather than converting on the server side and displaying in the native application, as is done with legacy Office formats. Therefore, editing ODF files is not possible on Windows Phone 7.

Accessing ODF files on Windows Phone 7.

The short URL domain is welcome for sharing documents and photos on Twitter; however, SkyDrive links are still not supported Twitter services and so thumbnails are still unavailable. At least the use of a short code URL will be easier on the eyes of our Twitter followers, though!

Sharing a document to Twitter

The results of sharing a document on Twitter via SkyDrive.