Paglo: A Web 2.0 approach to IT

The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.

Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.

There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo Crawler on your computer, and it will crawl the entire network, looking for computers, installed applications, devices, such as BlackBerrys, and information about users. That data is then uploaded to Paglo's secure servers and loaded into your personal Search Index.

Once all of this data is online, you can access it from any Web browser, so your access is not limited to only when you are at work. Maybe network admins can finally get some vacation time and still stay up to date with what's going on.

Paglo's UI basically works by allowing you to search for key terms you are curious about within your network. It can also, for example, allow you to find the e-mail address for any user on the network if there is a problem with his or her system. The real value of Paglo, in my opinion, however, is its Dashboard feature.

Paglo's Dashboard can be compared to a customizable home page, with space for widgets that show you different data about your network. So, if you want to save your search for computers with Office installed, you can put that data on your Dashboard, in graph form, for quick reference.

When I talked with Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, one of the things that they were the most excited with is the ability to share search queries with the Paglo community. If one IT pro comes up with an extremely useful, but complicated, search query, you can just grab that query and put it on your Dashboard, instead of having to come up with it yourself. This, in combination with Paglo's open API, creates a great opportunity for a variety of mashups and dashboard widgets.

Paglo is concentrating on delivering a quality, free product for now but will most likely be adding additional premium functionality in the future for a price. It's nice to see Paglo bringing IT into the Web 2.0 realm. Hopefully it will gain enough traction to grow into an essential tool.