OK I admit that only a few people would use the words "IT management" and "cool" at the same sentence, but here I go! You can now work with your managements systems from your IM client. The latest release of RapidInformer now supports AOL IM, Google Talk, Jabber and IBM Sametime. You no longer have to be glued to the glass to stay informed or have a console running to interact with your management systems. Via the bidirectional IM interface, notification come to where you are and you can execute commands directly from your IM client or email. "ESM via IM" so to speak.
Let's review what this thing can do:
Notifications: Notifications can be send via email, SMS, instant messaging, or any system that has an API or command line interface. Not much new here other than Sametime support, moving right along.
Self service capabilities: Put the users in control of which notifications they'd like to receive and how. Users can select which notifications they'd like to receive, and specify the notification method from a web page that is dead simple to use. And users can dynamically modify their preferences, turn off IM notifications and turn on email, turn on/off a subset of notifications etc. Self service approach empowers the users and minimizes the administrative overhead.
Actions: Getting notified has limited value if you cannot do anything about it. No problem, RapidInformer now supports bidirectional communications. You can take actions directly from your IM client or email. Acknowledge a notification, change its severity, get notification or device details, add to the audit log, set ticket id, take/release ownership etc. Smarts integration module includes most commonly used commands out of the box as examples and more commands can be created to interact with any backend system.
We've dipped our toes into "coolness" before, bringing web 2.0 technologies into IT
management realm. We've integrated RapidInsight with Google maps to show device locations and with Simile timeline to display event history, etc. yet I think with RapidInformer we've now gone a step
further. RapidInformer is designed on top of what we learned from the consumer web last couple of years. Who knows may be some day, we can even make enterprise software sexy:)
RapidInformer is available for download as usual. Give it a spin, who knows, you may actually have fun :) But beware, admitting that may be hazardous for your social life!
