By Bridget Botelho, Senior Site Editor

Citrix Systems has shed some light on its plans for ShareFile, a cloud storage provider the company acquired earlier this month.

At Citrix Synergy in Barcelona this morning, the company said it will use the ShareFile platform to build services that allow users to share files across multiple devices and access them from any location. These services, called Follow-Me-Data Fabric, will provide features such as data sync, send and collaboration capabilities, user authentication and more.

Citrix acquired ShareFile after Box.net rejected its $600 million acquisition offer earlier this year. Although ShareFile is not as popular as Box.net or Dropbox, it does give Citrix a product in the cloud storage and collaboration market, where competitor VMware is actively acquiring similar technologies that detach customers from PC dependency.

Citrix’s Follow-Me-Data Fabric will integrate with a variety of Citrix products, starting with Citrix GoToMeeting and Citrix Receiver. It is an open service, so third-party product providers are free to tap into it as well.

Citrix’s online meetings service, GoToMeeting, will have a new Workspaces capability that uses Follow-Me-Data Fabric. GoToMeeting Workspaces will be available in 2012.

The Follow-Me-Data Fabric technology will also be built into Citrix Receiver, the universal software client that lets users connect to applications. A tech preview will be available this quarter.

“As part of Citrix, ShareFile wants to be a sort of DropBox for enterprise,” said Rachel Chalmers, an analyst with the 451 Group. ”It’s a lovely fit with the consumerization of IT and the positioning of Citrix Receiver as an app store precisely analogous to Apple’s or to the Android Marketplace.”

A massive BlackBerry outage has left users with limited email and messaging services for much of this week.

The BlackBerry outage began Monday for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it spread to North America on Wednesday. Research in Motion (RIM) has blamed the BlackBerry outage on the failure of one of its core networking switches — and the subsequent failure of its backup system.

The BlackBerry outage comes at a terrible time for RIM. Once the only game in town for mobile email, its market share is eroding as consumer devices running Apple iOS and Google Android take hold. RIM still offers the strongest enterprise management capabilities, but that matters less and less, thanks to the consumerization of IT. And its enterprise reputation will definitely take a hit with this extended BlackBerry outage.

Late Wednesday night, RIM said service levels were improving. And today, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis posted this message on YouTube:
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Apple iOS 5 released

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5, hit iTunes on Thursday. The release brings more than 200 new features to the iPhone and iPad, including a drop-down notifications menu, better camera options and Twitter integration that’s laid on real thick.

With iOS 5, Apple is also moving beyond mobile devices into another consumerization area: cloud storage. The new iCloud service stores music, videos, photos and documents and makes them available across your iOS devices, Macs and even PCs. Hey, speaking of cloud storage…

Box.net targets businesses

Cloud storage and collaboration service Box.net has raised $81 million in its latest round of funding, designed to help boost its enterprise offerings.

Box.net and similar services, such as Dropbox, have grown in popularity among people who want to store and access their data and documents — both personal and business — from any device. But this Wild West approach has businesses concerned about security, and now the major IT vendors are swooping in.

Microsoft (Windows Live SkyDrive), Apple (iCloud) and VMware (Project Octopus) are all entering the cloud storage market to address enterprise needs. Box.net, for one, is not backing down.

“Businesses of all sizes are moving their information and collaboration to the cloud, and with this new capital we’ll support their transition by continuing to aggressively out-innovate legacy players like Microsoft,” co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said in a press release.

Box.net also turned down a $600 million acquisition offer from Citrix Systems earlier this year, according to Forbes. And to combat this week’s debut of iCloud, the company is giving away 50 GB of storage to all iOS users.