Watchdog software

[Brad Pears]

We are just beginning to allow users to work from home periodically due to
phyusical space requirements at the office. Some users dial in to run a
terminal services session and work in that session all day while others can
get what they need by simply using a VPN connection to map some drives to
our servers.

I have been asked by the owner of the business who is a little worried about
the "working from home" thing, to look into some software that could tell us
what people are actually doing when they are on-line. He doesn't want to
know minute by minute - but wants to be able to periodically inform a user
that on such and such a day at such and such a time it was noticed they were
doing such and such. His theory is that if you do this every once in a
while, that alone would be enough to keep most people on the straight and
narrow (our owner does not start by trusting people. He distrusts first and
then trusts later on...)

Does anyone know of any type of software that can accomplish this type of
thing?

Thanks,

Brad

 

[Henry Craven]

There is certainly a whole swag of Computer Monitoring Spyware out there
as any Google search will show you. I don't know of and haven't heard of
anyone running any on the SBServer or TS though, so it would probably
need to run on the remote client. - HOWEVER, before you do that I'd have
a long talk with both lawyers and employees about the legal implications
of doing such tracking/monitoring.

Remote Clients are intrinsically less secure than Office Computers.
Little Johnny walks up to the PC while mum if off making him milk and
cookies and he tries the new thing he learned at school today Del *.*

I'd also make sure they run XPpro with an insistence that all SPs and
patches are loaded as well as Antivirus and local firewalls and install
the XP Security SP as soon as it comes out.

 

[Brad Pears]

Thanks for the info. You are correct, google turns up tons of stuff - most
of it more for monitoring what's going on inside your lan as opposed to what
an employee is doing at home.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Rick Dilley]

Brad,

Symantec used to own (2) separate products for monitoring...Mail Gear and I
Gear. I think that they have folded them into other products of theirs.

I had one client who successfully used IGear to enforce a acceptable use
company policy for internet resources.

One employee was warned twice then fired.

The guy had been going to unacceptable websites.

Hope this helps

RickD