Employee monitoring software
Employee monitoring software is a means of employee monitoring, and allows company administrators to monitor and supervise all their employee computers from a central location. It is normally deployed over a business network and allows for easy centralized log viewing via one central networked PC. The use of such software however is seldom used by corporations as it closely resembles spyware and is often misused. Instead, companies typically opt for more popular remote desktop software.
Related techniques
- Email monitoring
- A process in which incoming and outgoing mail passes through E-mail filtering software to search for content which may violate the policies of the employer. Often E-mails which are flagged by the filtering software will be then reviewed by a human to verify the validity of the E-mail content. While an employee has the right for privacy, using company property means a company may monitor the way their equipment is used. A wide misconception with electronic emails in a work environment is that privacy rights issued with electronic mail is exactly the same as the private communications of sending and receiving U.S. mail with an envelope. As long as the services being used are provided by the employer, it is not an invasion of privacy if they monitor their own systems. For the monitoring of employee electronic mail to be considered an invasion of privacy, it must fall under certain conditions. The person reading the electronic mail must engage in this activity intentionally with the purpose of intruding on private affairs, and the intrusion must be highly offensive to a reasonable person.
- Events timeline logging
- Log all events employees performed and view them in an organized listing.
- Website activity
- Log all websites visited by the popular browsers. See also Web analytics, Web log analysis software
- Application usage
- Monitor and log all applications ran.
- Documents opened
- Record documents and files opened and viewed.
- Attentiveness monitoring
- Display a popup on the employee's workstation with a set amount to time to click it.
- Screenshot monitoring
- Software can take employee's monitor Screenshots, often periodically at random intervals. Images are usually stored in a central location where administrators can review them later.
- File access
- Deleting or downloading files from employee's computer.
- Computer location lapping
- Log physical locations of a computer on a map.
- Removable storage blocking
- Block USB storage to prevent data leak.
- Print monitoring
- Record print jobs from any user in company network.
Optional functions
- Remote Desktop Viewing - Grab screenshots of the remote computer's desktop.
- Remote control, control the keyboard and mouse of a remote computer.
- Remote file management, edit files from centralized console.
- Remote System Information Viewing - View a listing of various system information for the remote PC.
- Remote Internet Connections Viewing - View a list of the current Internet connections on the remote machine.
- Remote Recent Document History Viewing
- Remote Message Display
- Remote System Lockdown Control
See also
- Computer surveillance
- Job satisfaction
- Malware
- Spy software
- Spyware
- Trojan horse