Interesting Amazon S3 tools

I have been wanting to write on this topic for quiet a long time by now. I feel good to say that I was also one of the early adapters of the cloud technology. I have been using Amazon S3 for alomst close to 2 years by now.

I initally started off with the S3Fox plug-in for Firefox. I tried BucketExplorer, but then it was too slow. By then we had completed a small web based product by name SmartS3 which we floated for our internal usage. This was not just an tool for Amazon s3, but we were having User Management integrated and we were able to server multiple users with the same s3 account!

S3Fish, a bucket explorer tool for Amazon S3 started off and we decided to do it on Microsoft platform. Detailed study made us decide to do it on MS.NET Framework v3.0. We successfully completed S3Fish, a tool that would help you to perform all the available functionality in Amazon S3 and hosted it via Code Google as open source. It was welcome by more users across the globe. We crossed more than 250 downloads in a week and we forwarded that tool to Amazon. Amazon gave us a good review, but suggested us to change the name to be propetiary and thus CloudBuddy was born.

By the time CloudBuddy was born, we had a hand full of tools for Amazon S3. A lot of tools. I decided to try CloudBerry since was more popular than any other tool. I really like the looks of the tool when I started off. But it was not very intresting on regular usage, it gave me a feel that it was another FTP / S3 explorer.

The biggest problem with technologists like us is that we always keep looking for more and new. I started convincing me that I am expecting too much, but my team came back saying that, only a user who is well aware of technology would use Amazon S3 and there is nothing wrong in the way you feel. I was so impressed with the answer from my team and I was then and till now sure that CloudBuddy would definetly be a great tool!

It was and is true. CloudBuddy has been having the MS Office plugin for alomst an year by now and there are several tools which sell Outlook plugin for cloud itself as a priced product. CloudBuddy is now coming up with a lot of new looks and more advanced features. We have taken care of Data Security as a major feature in the forth comming release. We have used the RCA/SHA1 algorithm for encrypting the files while uploading them to the cloud. I am sure that this would be a good feature to have. Even one of our CB user in our forum had asked for this.

I have not tried or used all the tools available in the market, but I have definetly tried atleast the popluar ones. One thing I see that the CB team needs to do it, have more campaign's to feature the product.

My wishes and cheers to the CB Team, for the forthcomming release of CloudBuddy!