Following a sustained effort by the programming team at CFEngine AS, CFEngine Nova (the commercial version of CFEngine 3) will run natively on Windows NT platforms (not merely emulated under the Cygwin framework), with first release just into the new year 2010. Support has been added for registry management and Windows Access Control Lists, as well as integration with Event Manager and other goodies.
The plans over the next year include further integration of CFEngine with Active Directory and its group policies. CFEngine still has something to offer Windows users, even with the new tools that Microsoft is bringing to Windows 2008. One thing is integration of Windows resources into the CFEngine Knowledge Map, but also there is the ability to manage security through ACLs, and implement group policies convergently over time (not just one-off), as well as to integrate with a major Unix management system in a universal framework. Early rumours of the release have already led to a flurry of interest for the upcoming software release from a number of companies internationally.
