VMware releases a new feature for Socialcast: the Socialcast Integration Store. With the applications and services in the Socialcast Integration Store, you can add information from other programs to the Socialcast event stream. This way events can be commented on and referenced in other events.

You can, for example, import alarms from VMware vSphere into Socialcast and respond to them and discuss it with other collegues. This way of handling events is more dynamic and gives you the social power in fixing your IT problems.

 

vSphere alarms in Socialcast
vSphere alarms in Socialcast – image from VMware

The new applications and services in the Socialcast Integration Store include VMware vCenter Server.
The complete list of external applications as of now is:

  • Box
  • AirWatch Content Locker
  • Airbrake
  • GitHub
  • Jenkins
  • Jira
  • New Relic
  • Pager Duty
  • vSphere Alarms
  • Twitter
  • Blogs
  • Custom RSS/Atom
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • Reddit

A couple of use cases:

  • Collaborate on issues and alerts in a central location across many of the leading cloud management and DevOps tools
  • Monitor and take action on incoming alerts and messages from “human or machine”
  • Determine which alerts, virtual machines and admins to follow and which to mute to avoid information overload and keep only important information in the Socialcast feed
  • Reference previous conversations to determine best practices when solving an issue

What is Socialcast

For those that don’t know what Socialcast is, here’s the answer from the Socialcast FAQ:

Socialcast® is an enterprise social network platform. Although it offers familiar features found in personal social applications such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Socialcast is much more robust, and is designed for businesses who want to improve the exchange of ideas and information across teams, organizations and locations.

Traditionally, productivity tools such as email, calendaring and scheduling applications focus on automating routine tasks. Socialcast, on the other hand, focuses on making knowledge work more efficient. Knowledge work is rarely routine, and it deals with ideas, exception handling and problem solving. Email is a highly inefficient tool for this type of human interaction—a question posted by email to a group of people quickly becomes a disjointed thread of “reply all” responses. Socialcast moves this type of information exchange into a real-time community environment, reducing time spent on emails and in meetings.