Graphical IPMI tools make life easier as you don't have to remember commands or syntax and as most GUI tools are provided by the IPMI device vendors, they may offer vendor specific functionality that isn't available in the generic command line tools. Of course, in all cases except regarding vendor specific (and thus not standards compliant) functionality, the command line tools should provide all necessary functionality and so GUI tools are not essential to get IPMI working.
There is a Java application from Supermicro called IPMIView which allows you to graphically manage servers with IPMI BMCs. The primary advantage of this tool is that SOL works easily and you can issue graceful reboot and shutdown commands if you install Supermicro's graceful shutdown daemon.
Install as a regular user using sudo from the command line by uncommenting the following line from /etc/sudoers if need to:
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
add your user to the wheel group:
usermod -G wheel <username>
Make the installer executable:
chmod +x ./IPMIView-Linux_2.6.31_071005.bin
run it as sudo:
sudo ./IPMIView-Linux_2.6.31_071005.bin
It should now run. When the install finishes you need to chmod +x the bundled JRE directory as it's root only by default:
sudo chmod -R +x /opt/SUPERMICRO/IPMIView/_jvm/
Now you should be able to run
/opt/SUPERMICRO/IPMIView/IPMIView20.bin
as a regular user and create a desktop icon for it by right-clicking the desktop, clicking Create Launcher and providing the command as above and any other meta-data you wish to add, like description, name and and a nice icon from the installation directory.
Using the IPMIView application is covered in the Supermicro documentation