- Using the Windows 8 Metro-Style App
- Accessing Your SkyDrive from Windows Explorer
- Fetching SkyDrive Resources from a Non-Windows 8 PC
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Fetching SkyDrive Resources from a Non-Windows 8 PC
Until Microsoft gives us the aforementioned SkyDrive desktop app, we pre-Windows 8 users must content ourselves with the SkyDrive.com Web site (see Figure 8).
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Figure 8 The SkyDrive.com Web interface
The HTML5—powered SkyDrive.com Web site supports quite a few convenient features, including drag-and-drop file uploading and, as we have already mentioned, Office Web Apps.
As our final exercise, let's create a sample Microsoft Office document directly from the SkyDrive Web site and open the file in Windows 8. To begin, we can click the appropriate Create button (see Figure 9).
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Figure 9 Creating a new Microsoft Office document at SkyDrive.com
Next, we can use the appropriate Office Web App to author our document. In this example, I used Microsoft Word to create a simple document called WindowsXP_Document.
Finally, we can fire up our Windows 8 computer, start up the SkyDrive app, and open WindowsXP_Document. Voila! The document appears exactly the same as it did in Windows XP, and we are free to view and edit to our heart's content by using Internet Explorer 10 and Office Web Apps (see Figure 10).
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Figure 10 Windows 8 view of a SkyDrive doc created in Windows XP
Conclusion
Regardless of how you might feel about the Windows 8 Metro interface, I don't think we can argue against the notion that Microsoft has done a great job thus far of integrating Windows 8 with its SkyDrive cloud storage service. I feel that once Microsoft releases the SkyDrive Desktop app, SkyDrive will be positioned very strategically against its main competition in this sector.
Please check back regularly at Que Publishing and the Building Windows 8 blog to stay current on developments concerning SkyDrive and Windows 8. In the meantime, I hope that you found this article useful.