Employee Monitoring Software

I have regular PC computers for my employee's and I only want them to access about 3 or 4 websites, and excel and word. I want a program that I can do this with, I've been searching on the web and everything I find seems like the sites are just riddled with ads and other BS.

Anybody know any good software?

Thanks.

While I wouldn't want to be one of your employees, I do have the answer.

Its called parental controls. Built into OSX

Mac OS X 10.4 Help: Using parental controls to set safe limits on an account

louishen said:

While I wouldn't want to be one of your employees, I do have the answer.

Click to expand...

You took the words right out of my mouth louishen!!!

"Boo Hiss" to "Big Brother"!

- Nick

Alternatively, you could also mess with the /etc/hosts file and point everything but a few sites to 127.0.0.1. You could also just filter out everything you don't like with firewall settings.

There was a survey that I read a while back that explored the level of productivity of employees with varying degrees of Internet freedom and oversight and the end result was that the employees that were free to do some personal browsing (banking, quick shopping), some mindless browsing and the freedom to use the Internet to search for things that could help them accomplish their tasks were the most productive, while the ones with the most restrictive environment were the least..

Food for thought..

Regards

Nowadays, most large corps and the US Govt use proxy servers which filter out all the nasty sites anyway. I agree with Raz0rEdge, let em loose!

I used to work for a bank and we'd have clients calling up asking about bizarre (and unrecognisable) company names on their credit card statements. For example, Subway Restaurants appears on statements as Crumb or something. We'd have to trace which company it was and all too often that we'd call the client and tell them the company and they'd say "oh yes I remember that"... it wasted the banks time and money.

So one day I hit upon the idea of entering the name into google and seeing the results. A lady called me up and went to some shop and it appeared on her statement as something other than the shop name. I entered it into google and sure enough; it came up saying the term was the parent company of a paint shop, which the lady went to. So I suggested it was a paint shop and she said "ah yes I did go to the paint shop that day! Thanks a lot for that!" and the case was closed. No putting a trace on the mystery charge. No callbacks. No stopping her credit card as she had an unknown charge on it. No hassle. It was settled then and there.

The bank eventually decided to limit our internet use a few months after that. Customers would call up and ask about an unknown charge and I would have to say "I'm not sure. I have to put a trace on it for you."...

The point is: the internet is too frequently looked upon as a time waster, something detrimental and dangerous to a company rather than a helpful tool.

- Chris