By Jens Koerner, Director of Product Management, Socialcast
Today, VMware released the Socialcast Integration Store. For years, the tried and trusted Socialcast Reach integration capability has allowed customers to embed Socialcast collaboration into various different applications – such as Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com.
Today’s announcement of the integration store completes the circle for users and applications by allowing application administrators to post events and notifications into Socialcast – allowing users to collaborate around those events from their mobile device or the web.
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Figure 2: vCenter Server alerts surfaced in Socialcast mobile application
The first use case we focused on was the collaboration among DevOps teams and VMware vSphere administrators. With the Socialcast Integration Store, DevOps and VMware vSphere administrators can integrate the applications they use on a daily basis into one event stream in Socialcast. Through this collaboration, the teams can exchange information about these events – starting with the vCenter Server web client alongside the following third-party applications. These third-party applications include:
- Airbrake
- Github
- Jenkins
- JIRA
- New Relic
- PagerDuty
This idea was first introduced by Ravi Soundararajan in his VMworld presentation (see also this TechCrunch article) where he notes that solving complex problems requires collaboration, particularly when multiple players, skill sets and regions are involved.
The combination of the Socialcast network and these tools empower VMware vSphere® administrators, DevOps teams and developers to tackle a variety of DevOps issues. The primary features and use cases include the ability to:
- Collaborate on issues and alerts in a central location across many of the leading cloud management and DevOps tools
- Reference previous conversation threads to determine best practices and resources when solving an issue
- Monitor and take action on incoming alerts and messages from “human or machine”
- View an intuitive user interface available across device types
- Determine which alerts, virtual machines and admins to follow and which to mute to avoid information overload and keep only pertinent information in the Socialcast feed
- Search for relevant information across the company
- Aggregate data traditionally siloed inside different applications to one central repository
Today’s announcement of the availability is the first step in making this vision a reality. And there is much more to come
To get started, sign up for a free Socialcast instance, create a group and integrate the various applications. The instructions of how to integrate the applications are in the integration store. For example, here is a screenshot of how to integrate VMware vSphere alerts into a Socialcast group:
For more information, check out the Socialcast website and our press release announcing the Socialcast Integration Store.
