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I got all excited this morning when I saw a link on Hacker News to BitPocket, one of the latest so-called “DIY Dropbox” offerings that’s open source. The excitement faded pretty quickly when I hit the GitHub repo and found that it’s just a “small but smart script that does 2-way directory synchronization” without most of the Dropbox features.

Dropbox didn’t get where it is today by being a wrapper for rsync, Git, Unison or any of the other open source tools for file synchronization. If you want to replicate Dropbox’s suceess, there’s a few features that are mandatory.

The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it's a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it's a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it's both.

ownCloud is a project started by Frank Karlitschek, who's been very active in the KDE project. This week, Karlitschek took ownCloud to the next level with former SUSE/Novell guy Markus Rex and funding from General Catalyst. Terms weren't disclosed, but sources say that the funding is "well into 7 figures" but below $10 million.

If there was any doubt that Box.net has become a solid enterprise cloud provider, today's announcement of various security features, coupled with a boost to unlimited storage for all of its Enterprise accounts, should dispel them. Starting today, all Box Enterprise accounts will have unlimited storage for unlimited number of users. The Box Business accounts will double in size to a 1TB limit.

Box will also work with Intel's Expressway Cloud Access 360 single sign-on service for better user authentication, provisioning and policy management of their accounts. This integration will also provide two-factor authentication with one-time passwords before a user can login to their Box account. Box will also sync with Active Directory so that groups and users can be automatically populated inside the Box account. This makes it easier on admins as well as makes the Box system more secure: admins can eliminate terminated users' accounts quickly.

But wait, there is more. Two other security features will be rolled out in the next week that include smart shared links and improved trusted access. The former makes it easier to limit access to who can view a file to users inside a company domain, giving it more granularity (something that Box' competitors have had already). The latter expands trusted access to track logins from mobile devices and custom apps that are connecting via the Box API. IT admins can limit the number of devices that an employee can access from the same ID.

With all the cloud storage providers available these days, one thing I was looking for was a simple way to share and synchronize a networked file server in my office with a cloud-based repository. Sure, there are dozens of providers that will let you synch to your desktop. But what if you have a couple of branch offices and want to share files between them or have multiple users in a single office and single place to backup your most commonly used files? That is a tougher proposition.

Cloud storage provider Box.net is moving to expand its reach beyond simple file sharing with a series of investments, partnerships and software extensions called the Box Innovation Network. They plan on investing two million dollars over the next two years to encourage a variety of add-on development around their core technology, as well as encourage more main-line enterprise software developers to use their resources and cloud services.

One of the main principles of cloud storage in the enterprise is that users should not have to know the physical locations of the devices that store their files. They're all pooled together into one virtual device that's well replicated and has enormous capacity. Up to now, these conveniences haven't scaled down to the consumer level. That's why, when you hear everyday folks ask about where they should keep their files, their questions boil down to, "Whose cloud would you recommend?"

It isn't exactly a cloud if it comes with partitions. Realizing that, a startup from June 2010 called Joukuu has been building a compelling solution: an all-inclusive desktop for users of multiple cloud-based storage platforms, including Box.net and Dropbox. The result is a kind of all-in-one Finder window for all files and documents, including Google Docs documents that you can edit inline.

Dropbox has been testing its Dropbox for Teams service for some time, but the other shoe has finally dropped. The company formally announced the service today, which looks a lot like standard Dropbox with corporate billing tacked on. Good news for companies wanting to offer Dropbox to employees, but is it up to competing with Box.net? Drobox may be the world's 5th most valuable startup, but it's still lagging Box.net pretty badly.

Twenty-four hours after Apple released iOS 5 and accompanying iCloud storage offering, Box has announced that they're offering iPad and iPhone users 50 gigabytes of free storage starting tonight. It's also increasing file upload limit from 25 MB to 100 MB.

To get that amount of storage from iCloud, users have to fork over $100 per year to Apple. Of course, one thing third parties like Box and Dropbox cannot provide is the seamless, cross-device syncing of things like contacts, calendars, reminders and Web bookmarks, nor can you easily use it to remotely back up your entire device in the cloud, as iCloud allows. Instead, Box has its own iOS app from which cloud-based files and folders can be managed.

The lines among file sending, collaboration and cloud drive services is blurring with announcements in the past month from two providers, YouSendIt and ShareFile. While it is nice to have choices, it is getting harder to figure out when to use one kind of service or another for your storage and transportation needs.

File storage and document collaboration software-as-a-service provider Box today announced integration with Google Docs. Box users can now edit documents stored in Box using Google Docs, as well as create Google Docs files within Box folders.

Earlier this year Box announced integration with enterprise content management systems such as SharePoint and Documentum. The company is now positioning itself as a piece of glue between ECM and Google Docs.