Accellion expanded beyond its secure file transfer heritage with the release of Enterprise Secure Collaboration for creating workspaces of related files for collaboration:

“Accellion today announced it is expanding beyond enterprise secure file transfer to enable enterprise secure collaboration. With the introduction of Accellion Secure Collaboration and Accellion Mobile Apps, Accellion is providing business users with the ability to quickly and easily create secure workspaces for internal and external project teams to collaborate and share files. Users can securely access workspaces and files from almost any device including desktops, laptops, mobile devices and smartphones while corporations and government agencies have the protection they need to ensure enterprise data security and demonstrate compliance with HIPAA, SOX and FDA.“

My Comments
1. The security concerns of making enterprise data available to outside partners is a critical issue. Accellion appears to be fairly confident that security is built in from day one, rather than being an afterthought. That’s a good sign.

2. Mobility is huge, and the offering supports mobile access. Eg., “users can view, comment on and share files via a laptop, smartphone or web-enabled device from native mobile applications developed by Accellion for the iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry.” That’s broad support, from day one.

3. From a 7 Pillars perspective, Accellion is playing in Pillars 1 and 2. In terms of Pillar 1, though, you can only share “files” of all kinds, not more structured data such as a list of contacts (beyond a spreadsheet), a list of tasks, etc. That may be enough for what you need … or not.

4. On the Accellion File Manager screen shot, I do like the integrated / threaded comments shown inline with the files and documents. That makes working with the files with others easy and more transparent than hiding these comments elsewhere.