Many Windows users who partake in Microsoft’s free cloud storage service, SkyDrive, have always found it odd that the software company did not make it easier to access those cloud-stored files directly from the desktop. There are third-party ways of doing this, but it has always seemed like integration that should be included from the box.

In a post on the Building Windows 8 blog, program managers on the Windows 8 team, Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, have detailed the upcoming integration with the SkyDrive cloud service and their new Windows 8 OS set to beta any day now. In this post about the new SkyDrive integration are some tidbits about the upcoming integration in previous and current versions of Windows, Vista and Windows 7. Here’s what the post had to say:

“We’ve consistently heard from our most loyal customers that you want SkyDrive on the desktop, and we’re happy to announce that we will be releasing a desktop app”…”The benefits are obvious: easy drag-and-drop upload and download support for SkyDrive, anywhere access to your data, offline access, and the power of Windows Explorer to manage your files and folders. All of these things will be available with SkyDrive on the desktop.”

If you’ve ever used a Windows Phone and have switched devices for whatever reason then the implications of the desktop app will be very obvious. Let’s say you have a massive picture collection which currently takes up many gigs of local storage on your PC. You can simply upload them to SkyDrive as photo albums and access them anytime, anywhere you have a PC with a web connection. Upload them once, access them anywhere.

Of course, the SkyDrive integration in Windows 8 is going to be much better and weaved throughout the OS as a standard, but the addition of a SkyDrive desktop app for Vista and Windows 7 should make it a bit easier to future-proof yourself and merge your information over to the cloud. You can read more about the SkyDrive integration as well as other Windows 8 news over at Windows8News.com.