Microsoft recently announced a new offer to Box, Dropbox, and Google’s G Suite customers to use its OneDrive cloud storage service. For businesses already using any of those three competitor products, Microsoft will provide Microsoft OneDrive for Business service free of charge until the contract with the other company ends. Google quickly followed with its own announcement of a new feature that allows users to edit Microsoft documents from within Google Drive. The world of content collaboration just got more interesting — and a lot more adversarial.
But for Citrix and Microsoft — partners for more than three decades, and the only companies considered leaders in this space for both cloud and hybrid solutions by major analyst groups — things remained the same. There are two key reasons for this. First, Citrix already has its own highly-successful industry-leading file access and collaboration service called ShareFile. And second, whether or not a company chooses to take Microsoft up on its offer, Citrix Workspace already enables our customers to make content collaboration, business and technology decisions transparent to the end user. If Citrix customers want to move their data from one solution provider to another — and even back again — our cloud connectors deliver a consistent user experience even when moving between data and workloads or between clouds.
Extending the value of OneDrive with ShareFile
The file sync-and-share market continues to evolve as corporate IT leaders look to foster innovation and facilitate a variety of work styles with true digital workspace solutions. Employees are also evolving, demanding anywhere, any device environments for their apps and the data needed to be productive. Together, Microsoft and Citrix not only enable the future of work, but also, they add value to each other’s solution offerings.
How does Citrix Extend the Value of Office 365?
Most Citrix customers already are reaping the benefits of the multi-decade partnership we’ve enjoyed with Microsoft. But for the Citrix customers that may not be using ShareFile, this is a chance to showcase how Microsoft and Citrix solutions work together in optimizing virtual workspaces and data source choice with connectors for Office 365, Azure, and SharePoint (as well as already providing access to Box, Dropbox, and Google).
The impact of the Microsoft and Citrix partnership is undeniable with over 230,000 joint customers and tens of millions of users that rely on our joint solutions every day.
- We allow users in a virtual environment to connect to data. Via ShareFile, users can access their OneDrive storage not just in any Citrix VDI environment, but also physical machines and mobile devices.
- No painful migration. With ShareFile, migration isn’t needed. ShareFile allows you to securely access legacy storage with the same ease as cloud storage with connectors that allow users to have a single point of access to all data sources including networks drives, OneDrive, SharePoint, as well as personal cloud repositories like Box, Dropbox, and Google.
- Security — Citrix Workspace provides complete cloud services for apps, desktops, networking, and data sharing on any device, anywhere.
The bottom line
Citrix powers a better way to work by delivering the experience, security, and choice people and organizations need to unlock innovation, engage customers, and be productive — anytime from anywhere. If you use ShareFile, your business is future-proofed and your users will continue to have secure access regardless of the underlying repository they need to access. And if you haven’t, thanks to the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix, you’re still covered.
Said best by Microsoft’s CVP Brad Anderson in our 2017 joint virtual event Accelerating a secure journey to the cloud, “Citrix has done an incredible job at understanding what Microsoft 365 is and integrating with it in a way that all these attributes, all this value, all this security I’m talking about automatically apply to anybody using the Citrix apps and the Citrix services because of the deep partnership that we’ve had for so long.”
And even in view of the ongoing war in cloud storage, Citrix takes the middle ground!
