Online file sharing service provider YouSendIt has introduced an early enterprise portfolio, now that it has passed the 28 million user milestone. The name of the suite is Workstream, and the first product is a SharePoint plugin that aims to significantly extend the functionality of the immensely popular collaboration service. It’s generally available now.

The idea is to make adoption as simple as possible, both for the IT department and the workers themselves, many of which are accustomed to using Microsoft software. YouSendIt integrates with Outlook to make navigation and data management a great deal easier, while bringing the email client —  along with SharePoint and Active Directory – to other platforms beyond the company firewall.  Workstream supports iOS, Android as well as Windows and Mac, and also features a web-based portal through which users can access their corporate accounts.

“Our success has been predicated upon our focus on the professional user and the ease with which we help them collaborate,” said Ivan Koon, CEO, YouSendIt. “By deeply embedding into existing email workflows, we have become the de-facto standard for extended enterprises. Now we are raising that bar by providing deeper collaboration features across mobile devices, smarter integration with the entire Microsoft stack and end-to-end policy and user management so that IT is confident in how data gets shared outside the firewall.”

File-sharing and collaboration apps in general are a growing trend in social enterprise, with many cloud services finding new opportunities here (think YouSendIt, Dropbox). SugarSync is one of the latest success stories in this market thanks to its recent $15 million funding round.

But for YouSendIt, the shift towards cloud collaboration is a long-term investment in the future, evolving around growing demand for tools to make you faster and more efficient.  This means YouSendIt will also extend its business model deeper into the enterprise, something the company’s been hinting at with its last few releases.

For Workstream,  YouSendIt plans a similar business model to its existing offerings.  “One thing that’s not changing is our continued leveraging of our consumer and pro-sumer aspects of our service–freemium.  There’s a lot of innovation going on in the freemium trend and we’re a leader in leveraging this model successfully,” says Mihir Nanavati, YouSendIt’s VP of Product Management and User Experience.

“We’ll continue to focus on the types of industries with business-to-business collaboration–that’s where the demand is, and our approach leveraging email will continue to allow us to do things competitors can’t do,” Nanavati goes on.  “We’ll focus on high value content.  What you’ll see is more integration with more business apps.”

That means we may see YouSendIt integrated in Salesforce, in addition to Outlook and Share Point.  YouSendIt is also focused on adding services on top of its integration points, reinforcing solutions around data loss and security.

Contributors: Maria Deutscher