With global workforces and customers spread across the globe, organizations need to provide scalable tools for providing massive amounts of information easily, quickly and securely. However, most of our partners can't afford, or simply don't want, to build huge data centers across the world to support this requirement.
This is where Amazon S3 steps in: it provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and relatively inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites.
MonoX now includes a data provider that hooks into Amazon S3, allowing users to store their data in the cloud and not on a database or file server somewhere in house. Best of all, this functionality is totally transparent to the end user, and site admins can access it via the familiar file explorer interface that is identical to the standard GUI. Additionally, power users can develop their own file providers for other storage services by extending the FileBrowserContentProvider class and implementing the IFileContentProvider interface.

Blog comment spam has been a massive frustration for our users over the last few months. Although the original release of MonoX blog subsystem followed the Google recommendations for preventing comment spam, the guys behind this obviously lucrative business don't really care about "nofollow" tags - they are submitting non-relevant comments agresivelly. On a side note, there are several companies that allow you to buy spam comments in batches of 100 or 1000, as described in this article. It's no wonder that some of our users got more than 20k spam comments submitted in less than six months to only a dozen blog posts.

This is going to change with the new, "social networking" release of MonoX later this month. We provide a pluggable, provider-based architecture that enables users to pick one or more public antispam services or develop their own solutions. Akismet and Defensio are suported out-of-the-box; if you want to develop your own filter we recommend starting with the article on Bayesian spam filter on CodeProject.

You may choose manual or automatic comment approval modes - in any case, if the comment is considered to be spam, it will not show in the comment list without your approval and your resident spammer will have to search for his next victim somewhere else.

You may noticed that we've been quiet for the last couple of months. The vacation season is not the primary reason for the lack of updates - quite contrary, we are adding new features to MonoX on a daily basis. Just to give you a test of things to come, here is a short list of features that will be included in the next version that will be released later this year:

- MonoX is switching to .NET 3.5, allowing us to use LINQ, Dynamic Data, portions of MVC technology and similar stuff in the core libraries
- we have switched to the Web application project model, as it offers way better development experience on larger projects - compilation process is now shortened dramatically
- we have introduced some exciting changes to the licensing scheme - more on that later
- MonoX will include a complete Social Networking module set: friend lists, invitations, messaging, wall, notes, groups, profiles...
Stay tuned for more news and let us know which features do you want to see included in next releases.

Recently i started to use an application optimization package - Web Application Optimizer (WAO) - with features that include HTTP compression, ViewState optimization and CSS/Javascript optimization. WAO significantly increases the response time for Web applications of all sizes, and, most importantly, there is no need to modify the source code of your applications!

The package works in very different application scenarios and we've got plenty of useful feedback from the first group of users. There has been a slight confusion related to the availability of WAO in our MonoX framework. I wanted to formally announce that  WAO is available by default in all versions of MonoX. It is easy to tell if the WAO is active by the absence of big ViewState data chunk from the page source.

This is a preview of the MonoX blog module. It is very easy to use, but still offers a complete functionality of "stand-alone" blog engines:

• multi-user support
• WYSIWYG editor
• support for multiple categories
• role support
• template/theme support
• automatic tag extraction
• support for ping services
• Search engine Optimization (SEO) support
• support for gravatars
• ... and, of course, full integration with MonoX portal engine.

We will publish all updates on MonoX and the blog module in our regular column on Mono Software main site, http://www.mono-software.com/Blog.