The code share project continues to grow and the latest addition is a very interesting twist on Amazon & Force.com called Cloud Share.  There are several cool apps to move data, including my old favorite excel connector, but if i were writing a tool today, I probably would end up with something close to this.

John describes the idea behind this tool in his blog, and I would like to commend Model Metrics for contributing this tool to the Code Share.  As for the features the tool provides, I really like the notifications and the automation feature, a must have for a cloud based system.

The type of thing that I'd use this tool for can be described in terms of a simple business problem that occurs often in the supply chain.  This is where your supplier has an FTP site, and you would like to perform a regular ETL into force.com.  The loader can read a map file and upload the remote data into simple table.  Using this method, the automation allows this to be repeated on an ongoing basis, the notifications would let me know how it ran.

 Model Metrics has a fine history contributing to the Code Share, here is the link to their previous project Cloud Converter , Jon describes this in his blog post on this subject.

 If you have a chance to play with this pre built AMI, by all means, do post your experiences here or on the Developer Boards.