Despite all the news and speeches about Web 2.0 and advanced collaboration platforms, there’s a dirty little secret occurring right under the noses of the technical elite – most document collaboration and sharing is occurring via email. Most vendors attempt to discourage this wildly problematic practice with fancy screens and long lists of features – not YouSendIt. In March, the company primarily known for its online file sharing platform, introduced Workstream – an enterprise collaboration tool that allows users to share documents securely with people outside of their company right from Microsoft Outlook or SharePoint.

YouSendIt has taken a step to expand its presence in the enterprise market by forming a partnership with one of Microsoft’s top six large account resellers – Softmart. This is likely the first of many partnerships for YouSendIt as the attempt to build their network of partners and integration points within the enterprise. The new relationship with Softmart should provide YouSendIt more enterprise sales opportunities, something the company needs as it sets out to establish itself in the increasingly crowded frictionless collaboration and sharing market.

If you’ve never heard of this market sector, it’s because I just coined the term. It refers to vendors like DropBox, Box.net and even platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider eXo that are looking to make it easier for enterprise workers to share and collaborate on content. Although these vendors have very different technical solutions, it seems they all have a similar core premise – rejecting traditional highly structured collaboration approaches in favor of processes that are more fluid, social and engaging. The trend toward embracing this style of collaboration seems to be accelerating.

In the last month, multiple vendors have presented their interpretations of this next generation collaboration. Jive has released a new social intranet platform and gamification features. eXo promoted its social intranet-as-a-service to public beta. Citrix acquired three-year-old social workflow platform provider Podio to augment its existing portfolio of collaborative solutions (e.g. GoToMeeting).  Given the velocity and the growing strength of the market,  major vendors  incorporate similar strategies.

The increase in popularity of more fluid, social collaboration is not to suggest that there is no place for more formal processes. However, in many cases, this level of ceremony is not required, and a number of vendors are stepping forward to fill the market gap.