What website features are essential for attracting IT Pros from corporations?

Question

I'm developing a set of websites that are geared towards the IT Professional at businesses ranging from 10 to 5,000 employees (small/med business).

Most IT Professional expects a certain set of features when dealing with blogs, forums (such as gravitar)... but what I'm most interested in are the ~other~ addins that would be used in a site.

"ShareThis" and it's variations are a good example of a feature that I can incorporate... but there are other tools as well.

SSO, SAML, and WS-Trust are also examples that fall in this bucket of features I'm looking for.

Q: What re-usable website features do you like (or hate) to see when a new .com popps up? Would your answer change if you're visiting my site while at work?

Answer 1

Before you start "adding features" ... the site has to have a purpose. IT professionals use sites because they provide something of value to them.

What does this site do for IT Professionals to make their life easier?

Answer 2

A search facility is also good. If i want answers i don't want to be searching through pages of results looking for it, or worse still be told that there are no results when i know there must be.

Googlebinging (Google & Bing) is not always a good way to search technical sites, too much crap can be returned.

Answer 3

Here is a sample answer I'm shooting for:

IE8 Slices: Where it's possible to put up-to-date information into the brower's status bar. Who uses it? I'm not sure... but it's something an IT geek (like myself) might enjoy.

I don't know what other browsers have to offer, so feel free to add something FFox does, or Safari, etc.