'Facebook' for IT Pros Launches

ITPulse is a social networking service designed to boost IT communications and collaboration.

ManageEngine, an IT management solutions company, showed off the latest addition to its product portfolio--a social network service called ITPulse--at Interop in Las Vegas back in May. That service launched today following a three-month beta period.

ManageEngine calls ITPulse the first social networking service of its type specifically designed for IT. At Interop, ManageEngine product manager Dev Anand asked Tom’s IT Pro to think of ITPulse as a Facebook for the IT pro.

In fact, as we noted at the time, one look at ITPulse and you’d swear you are seeing a stripped-down (pre-timeline) younger brother to the social networking behemoth.

ITPulse is not just another Facebook clone, however. It is purely for the workplace.

The service is designed from the ground up to facilitate the distinctive communications requirements of IT groups and sub-groups. The latter allows sub-teams to chat amongst themselves privately. And because ITPulse isn’t open to general audiences, it is privately secured in ManageEngine’s cloud, there’s no potential—unlike with FaceBook—for private company information to accidentally leak to other ITPulse members or out into the wider world.

As Anand emphasized, ITPulse is “not for personal social networking. It is for IT only.”

For IT organizations that sign up for ITPulse, it provides a collaborative cascading wall to foster real-time collaboration between IT pros about IT infrastructure and other topics. Everyone on the team follows everyone else and, perhaps most importantly, the social networking tool provides line of communication during emergencies. 

That means, among other things, support for the auto-posting of user actions, alarms  and more generated by ManageEngine tools (OpManager and ServiceDesk Plus), as well as APIs for integration IT management tools from likes of BMC, CA, HP, IBM and others, in addition to those that are homegrown.  Should a network admin alter a router config file, for example, it will be picked up by OpManager as an alarm that’s posted on the IT organizations’ ITPulse wall when a member acknowledges the alarm or adds a note.

"ITPulse can serve as a secure, critical line of communication during emergencies—especially for large enterprise IT teams that have to collaborate overseas or across multiple locations,” said Anand. “It's a place where sysadmins and other IT staff can blow off steam and have a little fun because they now have a better communication platform that replaces the old email-based communication."

ITPulse is available as a module that integrates with ManageEngine’s IT management tools, as well as a standalone SaaS service. It is free for up to two users and $5 more per month for additional IT team members. User licenses are available via the ITPulse store.

“IT teams love ITPulse as it offers a common wall for both IT and IT management tools,” asserted Anand in a statement on launch day.

James Alan Miller is Managing Editor of Tom's IT Pro. He is a veteran technology journalist with over seventeen years of experience creating and developing magazine and online content. Founding editor of numerous business and enterprise computing sites at the internet.com network, James headed up the After Hours section at PC Magazine, as well as hardware and software sections of various Windows publications.

See here for all Tom's IT Pro articles written by James.

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