Overview
UA OneDrive for Business is the University of Alaska's branding of the Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business, an online service that provides resources for file storage, collaboration, and communication with other UA individuals. The OneDrive for Business service, aimed at enterprise users, is not the same as the OneDrive service offered by Microsoft to individuals. For information on the differences, visit Microsoft's What Is OneDrive for Business page and read the section titled How is OneDrive for Business different from OneDrive.
OneDrive for Business is a personal document and file storage hub. It's easy to upload, download, and share files. You can also create, view, and edit documents online using the integrated Office Online applications, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For those times you need the complete set of Office features, you can open your files in the full version of the applications and save them to your hard drive or back to the cloud.
Because OneDrive for Business is associated with your relationship to the University of Alaska, everything stored in it will be inaccessible should you leave the university. For this reason, it's best to use it to store materials that are your own personal university related (e.g. homework, business) use, like OneNote notebooks. For storing materials that are important for departments, schools, colleges, or other groups at the university indefinitely, you should be aware that there are several options available more suitable for collaboration such as network file shares, Google Team Drives, Microsoft Teams, and a SharePoint Online site. All of them offer various features and benefits.
For additional information read about UA OneDrive for Business.
What materials do I need?
How do I use this technology?
Launch a web browser and go to https://portal.office.com and log in with your University of Alaska email address (e.g. UaUsername@alaska.edu).
If you are already logged into Office 365 you can click on the OneDrive link on the Office 365 tool bar to see your documents library.
From here you can manage files and folders in your OneDrive. Clicking the "…" to the right of a file or folder will allow you to see more information about it. You can open the document for editing, change sharing options, add to workflows or view the object properties.
OneDrive for Business within Office 365 gives everyone unlimited cloud storage that can be accessed from virtually anywhere. From within OneDrive, you can create Microsoft Office documents and share them with fellow students, staff, and faculty.
After logging into Office 365, click on the OneDrive icon. This will take you to your personal OneDrive.
From within OneDrive, you can now create new documents, edit existing ones, and share them.
To share a document, highlight the document you would like to share, and then click share.
The Share document window will then open. If you want to invite specific people from within UA to see and/or edit your document, enter their name in the top box. You can also type “everyone” to share it with all of UA.
Notice that you can specify if the people you invite “Can Edit” or can “Only View” your document.
If you want to share a document without specifying other people, or want to share it with people not affiliated with UA, use the “Get a link” option. This will generate a URL that you can send to anyone you want to share with.
Editing a document will launch the appropriate software on your local computer or the web based version of the application if it's not installed on the local computer.
Some browsers will warn you of this action as possibly malicious activity.
You can check the Remember my choice… box to avoid seeing this every time you choose to edit an item.
Clicking Launch Application should start the program and open your document for editing.
If you choose Edit in Browser or View in Browser from the"…" menu, you will launch the "web app" version of the appropriate application inside your browser window.
When you are editing in the web app your changes are automatically saved when you close the web app.
Creating a New Folder or Document
- Navigate to your OneDrive for Business.
- Select the "new document" link.
- Select New folder or a document type from the list.
- Name your new folder or file and get started collaborating!
Collaborating
More than one person can have a shared file open at the same time, this will be indicated one of two ways.
If you have the document open in the installed application on your computer, there should be an indicator at the bottom of the application window similar to this:
Clicking on the icon will display a list of the users that have the document open for editing.
When changes are made to a document by one user they are noted in the Web App by an icon. If you mouse over the icon it will tell you that changes have been made to the document and that saving the document will refresh and show you those changes.
In the Web App, you can click UPDATES AVAILABLE link in the information bar at the bottom of the browser window to refresh the page.
Then the other user's changes will be highlighted with a green overlay.
Is there any additional information I should know about?
For additional assistance contact the IT Services Technical Support Center via phone at (907) 786-4646, toll-free at (877) 633-3888, email us at uaa.techsupport@alaska.edu, or visit the Services section to open a support ticket.