Managing columns in OneDrive for Business

I think most of us know that OneDrive for Business is using SharePoint Technology under the hood. In other words: if a user navigates to a document library in OneDrive for Business, this document library is managed like all the other document libraries in SharePoint. However, if you look at your OneDrive for Business, you will notice, that there is no document library, but something called Files which is looking similar to a document library.

Not too rarely, SharePoint users ask me if this is really a document library with all the bells and whistles and if the column layout can be changed (like adding new columns). Well, if this really is a regular document library, there should be a way to change the at least the columns. By carefully looking at this Files library, you'll notice that there is no options menu available. If we have a look at a SharePoint document library, we'll see, that a different aspx-page handles settings and columns. That's worth a try, so let's replace the current page onedrive.aspx with viewlsts.aspx, which is the page the SharePoint document libraries are using to manage settings. By doing so, we get the following view - looks familiar, right?

This view shows all the elements which are existing in our personal OneDrive for Business environment, and if we have a closer look at the Documents library, we'll notice, that this appears to be what OneDrive for Business usually displays as Files. Let's see what we can do in this view. If we hover with the mouse on Documents, a little context menu Settings is showing up.

Let's see what shows up when clicking on Settings.

This looks the OOTB settings page of a real document library, isn't it? OK, let's see if we can add a column. If we try to add a column, at first, it looks like this would work as expected, but even if we check Add to default view, the new column is not showing up in the main view of Files. The default view appears to be locked, which means that not the full set of functionality is available to document libraries hosted in OneDrive for Business, yet. At ignite 2018, Microsoft announced, that OneDrive for Business will soon be able to utilize the full power of SharePoint document libraries which includes all settings working as expected (that's what I would assume).

The good news is that at least some settings appear to be working. You can turn on/off usage of folders and select indexed columns. Although the default view can't be changed, we can still create custom views. These custom views can be used to display any additional columns (like the Document Type columns in my example), but we will need to manually change the URL to be able to utilize any custom view: replace /_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx with /Documents/Forms/My Documents.aspx - assuming 'My Documents' is the name of the view.

As we can see in the above screenshot, even a custom column (like the Document Type column which I created as a Managed Metadata column) is showing up in our custom view.

My summary: I think this example illustrates, that OneDrive for Business is indeed using SharePoint technology under the hood, although not all of the features are available yet. Some settings can be changed (like the index column, which will help with tackling the awkward 5000 items limit), but document libraries in OneDrive for Business can't be customized as regular SharePoint document libraries can, yet.

I am confident that this will change as soon as Microsoft unleashes the full power of document libraries in OneDrive for Business as having the ability to create custom columns in OneDrive for Business is a feature demanded by many users for a long time.

Although this article showed how to add custom columns to OneDrive for Business, this is not intended to be used in a professional environment as custom columns (especially if they are tagged as required) are likely to impact the synchronization process of the sync client. If you need custom columns in your OneDrive for Business libraries, my recommendation is to wait until Microsoft has officially release this feature!