It was another productive week for the cloud as Symantec Corp. overcame its differences with the biggest backers of OpenStack to join the OpenStack Foundation as the much-buzzed-about project’s 16th gold sponsor. Symantec had already made numerous important contributions to the platform, particularly in the area of documentation.

Symantec has been especially active in the development of Keystone, an authentication system that allows administrators to govern who can access what service in their OpenStack environments. The vendor has also contributed to the Glance component for managing virtual machines images. But although liberal in contributing internally-produced innovations to the open-source ecosystem, the company has also been trying to exercise patent rights over some of its donated code, an effort that has pitted it against several other top backers of the project.

The induction of Symantec into the OpenStack Foundation shows that the community is willing to put aside individual rivalries for the sake of advancing broader collaborative objectives.

Amazon eyes enterprise collaboration…

That’s something that Amazon, the proprietary yin to the project’s open-source yang, is also becoming more emphatic towards. The firm upgraded its enterprise file sharing service on Tuesday with a new synchronization feature aimed at making content stored on employee devices more accessible.

Workers can now create project-specific folders for sharing documents with colleagues that automatically propagate locally-made updates to every member of the team. The update is not as groundbreaking as some of the other enhancements that Amazon introduced recently, but it sends a clear signal that the company seeks to become a major player in the enterprise collaboration space.

…against formidable competition

The cloud giant can expect tough competition from the incumbent crowd, however. That includes familiar names such as Box, Inc., Dropbox, Inc. and Huddle, Inc., which raised $51 million in funding from Zouk Capital, Hermes GPE Environmental Innovation Fund and existing backers.

Huddle is used by more than 100,000 organizations around the world, including a healthy mix of government agencies and commercial companies. Its main appeal is as a unified interface that brings together most of the features that knowledge workers need to interact with peers in a single collaboration hub. The company intends to spend the new capital to add more capabilities and to scale global operations.