The Ottawa Business Journal from Ontario, Canada reports that N-Able has joined the System Center Alliance. The System Center Alliance is made up of Microsoft Partners, and specifically ISV’s who have technologies which are for and integrate with the System Center Suite of Products. N-Able are different in that they have signed an agreement with MS to integrate their software with the future versions of MS’s System Center Products.

The integration of third parties into System Center has had a checkered history. Some examples which spring to mind are ABC Software and their abortive Software Metering Solution for SMS 2.0, Crystal Reports and their horrific reporting for SMS 2.0 and of course the long running feud with Wise software in regards to SMS Installer.

Read the full article here

It’s been kind of quiet here lately. Since leaving Dimension Data, I’ve been working on a new product called Community Engine. We’re producing a leading edge, semantic web application, with all the bells and whistles of Silverlight, Active Directory and a slew of other technologies which will produce probably the coolest web platform since apache….

We hit beta 1 last week and are currently deep in issue management driving to beta 2.

We’re running a significant web farm at a co-location facility, performing management with System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Configuration Manager and a ton of powershell and other features.

It’s a tough job; I’m managing a team of devs as lead architect, a bunch of UI designers and a full featured operations team.

I’ve got a little more time now and will post updates as I get them…