An early Christmas present awaits subscribers of Microsoft's Office 365 service. The company has just announced that it is rolling out an upgrade that provides members with unlimited storage on OneDrive.
Currently, subscribers to Microsoft's cloud-based platform are given 1 TB of OneDrive storage. The upgrade, which gives Microsoft an advantage against competing services like Dropbox and Google Drive, comes at no additional cost to Office 365 subscribers.
Microsoft started the rollout for the upgrade immediately, with Office 365 Home, Personal and University members being the first in line to receive the endowment. The rollout will continue over the coming months, and subscribers can make a request to get in front of the line.
Subscribers of OneDrive for Business will receive unlimited storage at a later date. According to Microsoft, enterprise users that have opted for First Release, a Microsoft program that gives subscribers early access to product upgrades, will get unlimited storage by next year.
"Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365," Chris Jones, Microsoft's corporate vice president for OneDrive and SharePoint said.
"While unlimited storage is another important milestone for OneDrive, we believe the true value of cloud storage is only realized when it is tightly integrated with the tools people use to communicate, create, and collaborate, both personally and professionally. That is why unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations."
The move continues the drastic increase in OneDrive storage space that Microsoft is providing to Office 365 subscribers. In June, the company hiked the storage allocation for members from 20GB to 1TB. It also increased the free storage for OneDrive from 7GB to 15 GB. Microsoft's service now has the upper hand against rivals Dropbox and Google Drive, which only have limited storage options.
Office 365 subscriptions, which start at $6.99 for the Personal Plan, comes with a copy of Microsoft Office. This makes it a much better deal than Dropbox and Google Drive, which charge $9.99 for just 1 TB of storage.
