The public cloud became a much more productive place for enterprise workers last week thanks a series of major updates on the collaboration front, starting with Google Inc.’s introduction of a new extension that offers to plug its file sharing service into Office 365. The integration is the competitive equivalent of a trojan horse.

The search giant hopes that making it possible to access documents stored its platform directly through Microsoft Corp.’s rivaling productivity suite will help attract users away from the latter’s own cloud-based file locker. That holds the potential to kill two birds with one stone, driving the adoption of Google Drive while creating upselling opportunities where there were none before.

It’s a similar strategy to that Dropbox Inc. is pursuing towards Microsoft with its competing document sharing service, which also received a boost last week following the startup’s acquisition of an emerging enterprise collaboration provider called Clementine Labs Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Its flagship mobile app will shut down next month and relaunched as a native part of the file locker at a later date.

Dropbox hopes that the communications capabilities gained through the deal will help customers use its service more productively, the same goal IBM Corp. set out to achieve with the acquisition it revealed the day after the Clementine team announced the purchase. The difference is that the technology giant wants to provide that benefit not for office workers but rather developers.

The startup that IBM picked up is a hosting provider called Compose Inc. that has created cloud-based implementations of MongoDB Inc. and a number of other popular open-source databases modified to automatically handle administrative tasks such as adding and reducing storage capacity. That functionality will help Big Blue to make it easier for developers to build applications on its public cloud and thus hopefully broaden its appeal, or at least that’s the plan.

Photo via Geralt