OneDrive Groups

» see onedrive.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I had the MSN account, and then I had the Windows Live account that grew out of it without my ever asking for one. That transition happened to everybody in Turkey who had been on Messenger since the early 2000s, and it arrived with a set of Live-branded satellites that appeared next to your inbox one day. Groups was one of them. I never made one, but it stood there in the menu for years.

It launched on 2 December 2008 as Windows Live Groups. You made a group and added people, and the group got a shared calendar and an address you could mail to reach everybody at once, plus fifteen gigabytes of storage the whole list could write into. Office Online let two of you edit the same document.

The name kept changing because the storage under it kept changing. Windows Live became SkyDrive, SkyDrive lost a trademark case in the UK and became OneDrive, and the groups feature took each new name along with it. By the time it was called OneDrive Groups, Microsoft had already decided against it.

In May 2014 you could no longer create one, and nothing was announced about that at all. The announcement came in August 2015 and it named a date: 16 October. On that day every remaining group was removed, along with everything inside it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three names for one feature ~

Microsoft had run this play before. MSN Groups was the big one, a mailing list and message board product with a genuine population attached, and it closed in February 2009, two months after Windows Live Groups launched. The content did not transfer between them, because the two were built on different assumptions and Microsoft said so plainly at the time.

So the sequence is a consumer group product replaced by a narrower consumer group product, which was then replaced by a shared folder, while the same idea sold to companies as Office 365 Groups was never touched. A consumer collaboration feature has to justify itself on engagement every year. The enterprise version only has to appear on a licensing sheet.

~ the membership list ~

Microsoft's stated replacement was OneDrive shared folders: put the files in a folder, share the folder, carry on. That covers the storage exactly and misses the only part that was doing any work. A shared folder is a permission sitting on some files. A group is a list of people with a name on it, and that list exists whether or not anybody has uploaded anything to it yet.

Every product that has tried to kill a group and keep the folder has run into this. The files were never the reason people made the group. The reason was that a family or a five-a-side team needed somewhere to be a named thing, and the calendar and the storage were what you hung off the name once it existed.

~ what the sixteenth removed ~

Two months is not a long notice for a product that had already been frozen for eighteen months. Anybody who had stopped checking, which after May 2014 was most of them, had no particular reason to be watching for an email about it. On 16 October the groups went, and the documents and photos inside them went too, and the recovery path was whatever you happened to have downloaded before that date.

The instruction Microsoft gave was to download everything and upload it again into a shared folder. That is an honest instruction and it is also an admission. There was no migration offered because there was nothing on the other side to migrate the group part into.

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