Paglo network management service

All businesses need to keep track of their PCs and software, and several products already help small businesses with this chore. Now a new service, Paglo, leverages the expertise of a small but growing community to help you manage your networked hardware and software.

The service is unusually flexible and can be configured to suit the needs of a wide range of businesses, from a small outfit with a simple ten-computer network to a sophisticated midsize business with a thousand systems.

Managing a fleet of PCs has always been difficult for smaller businesses. They can't afford the high-end tools from Tivoli and others that are aimed at large enterprises, but because they are typically short on IT staff, they need automated help to monitor their computer network assets and resolve problems.

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All businesses need to keep track of their PCs and software, and several products already help small businesses with this chore. Now a new service, Paglo, leverages the expertise of a small but growing community to help you manage your networked hardware and software.

The service is unusually flexible and can be configured to suit the needs of a wide range of businesses, from a small outfit with a simple ten-computer network to a sophisticated midsize business with a thousand systems.

Managing a fleet of PCs has always been difficult for smaller businesses. They can't afford the high-end tools from Tivoli and others that are aimed at large enterprises, but because they are typically short on IT staff, they need automated help to monitor their computer network assets and resolve problems.

That's what makes Paglo, which opened to beta testers this week, so valuable. You can use its downloadable software to index the hardware and software on your internal network, and then monitor your network operations using a series of dashboards.

Paglo can search for and alert you about computer problems, then help you drill down to examine PC operations in more detail. A small but growing Paglo user community (some 900 businesses have tried the service in alpha testing for several months) shares ways on how to search for problematic IT issues.

Paglo is an impressive work-in-process. It has a few quirks, but offers a lot of value for a small to midsize business struggling to manage computer assets. The service is free during the indeterminate beta test period.

Searching for IT Solutions

The company calls Paglo the world's first search engine for IT, but that's misleading because it isn't an Internet search engine. Rather, it handles searches related to your internal IT assets--and it's not the first product or service to do so. For example, you can find out how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on your network's PCs or locate all PCs attached to your network.

In this mode of operation, Paglo is similar to other computer asset management applications, such as Total Network Inventory, which I reviewed last year.

What differentiates Paglo from simple asset management software is the ability to expand its functionality by tapping into the experience of the Paglo community by using Share-Its--configured searches, dashboards, and alerts developed by others that you may apply to your network assets.

How Paglo Works

You'll need to sign up for a Paglo account using Mozilla's Firefox Web browser. (Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff says Internet Explorer support is coming soon, with Safari support also planned.)

Then you download the Paglo Crawler software, install it on a PC with administrator privileges, and answer a few questions to configure it to access your network. Currently two versions of the crawler exist, one for Windows XP and one for Vista, though they will eventually be merged.

The crawler will explore and discover computer network assets and record them in a searchable index. It takes just a few minutes to install the crawler, but indexing requires more time--possibly 24 hours, according to the company.

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