Work Examiner
While technology has provided a lot of great benefits to businesses and organizations, it has also caused a lot of headaches when employees get side tracked researching about irrelevant topics, joining the conversations on social networking sites, or watching the latest viral videos. With all that there is to do on the Internet, employees often get caught up in all of the fun and aren’t working as efficiently as once before. Not only that, but using the Internet for recreational purposes also puts a company’s network at risk for viruses or slower connection speeds that can immobilize a whole office. In order to combat this issue, many businesses find that employee monitoring software helps managers regulate what their employees are doing on company time and equipment. We have analyzed and reviewed today’s most popular Employee Monitoring Software Systems so you can determine which best meets your needs and can help you increase efficiency at work.
Read on to learn more about Work Examiner.
Product Overview
Work Examiner has two editions available in its offerings for Employee Monitoring Software. Work Examiner Standard is best for small businesses with networks holding about 3-50 computers and is oriented towards managers, IT specialists and system administrators who want to have full control over employees’ computer activities. Work Examiner Professional is best for larger corporations with about 50-2000 computers and was built for use by top managers, middle management and HR department specialists who are looking for a powerful solution for monitoring work time with enhanced security and scalability. Data can be organized by employee, by department, or even by time and day of the week, so management can look for patterns in employees’ personal web use. The software can generate easy-to-understand reports so managers can view monitoring data quickly without all of the heavy data and numbers to decipher. Work Examiner also includes web filtering tools and can send automatic alerts to management when employees try to access certain websites.
Who Should Use This Product
Anyone looking to monitor employee computer usage will find this product very helpful. No matter the size of a business, Work Examiner software can cover all monitoring needs with its two different software packages built for small or large sized companies. This software is especially important to managers who want to keep a close eye on employee computer usage, as well as information technology teams and systems analysts who are normally in charge of monitoring and securing networks.
Web Usage Monitoring
It is very important to know how employees are using the Internet while at work and whether or not they are using their time efficiently. Work Examiner can track the distribution of web surfing time at your company between computers, users or user groups, departments, website categories and even down to the littlest details, like by days of the week, dates or hours. In addition to monitoring web usage, this software program also tracks the amount of time that a user spends on a certain site. Administrators can also set up web access alerts and messages that will automatically send emails to managers or department heads when employees access certain websites over the company’s network. This feature is customizable, so employees can also be sent a message and view a visible alert or message when they access a restricted page. This is useful when a page is not blocked by the network but you want to alert the user that they should not be accessing this particular page while at work.
Surveillance Features
Managers also have the ability to place surveillance features on employee computers. There are many features in the Work Examiner software package that allow for this and have proven to be quite helpful when monitoring web usage. Screen shots from any network computer can be viewed in real-time or can be taken at intervals, like for instance, every 30 seconds, and will be saved in the database for viewing at a later time. While a computer is idle, the timed screenshots will not take place, so managers will not have to worry about sifting through hundreds of copies of the same screen image. Another surveillance feature in Work Examiner is Email Capture, which allows managers to view every email message sent or received through the SMTP and POP3 protocols, as well as MS Exchange messages from MS Outlook. Other surveillance features that come with this package are keystroke recording tools and instant message recording from Windows Live Messenger 2011, MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and XMPP.
Reporting Features
Comprehensive worker activity reports can be generated through Work Examiner’s software. The system can log all HTTP/HTTPS requests and include them in a detailed web usage report so managers can view which pages are visited most. There are also helpful User Activity Reports that can be generated according to category of activities and can be put together in visual reports with graphs, bars, and statistics. Managers and administrators can also create reports based on current activities of employers, schedule report creation within the Work Examiner software, and create application filters and reports that will block that user from accessing certain pages in the future. With this software’s extensive data exporting tools, managers can easily export reports in just a few minutes into PDF, Excel, Rich Text or HTML, JPG, GIF, or BMP files.
Other Features
Work Examiner offers a lot of extra features to support their wide array of “standard” features for employee monitoring. Their Web Filtering tool allows managers to block specific sites by URL, content keyword, built-in category or URL mask, and create an “access denied” or redirected page where users will be sent upon trying to access a blocked page. The Web Usage Timer is also a helpful tool that shows employees the amount of time they spend on certain restricted or monitored websites. This small and discreet timer shows up in a corner of the screen and will show the time left before applying the filtering rule, which counts down each second while the user is surfing the site. There is also a dashboard that shows charts and graphs of the most critical reports in real-time. Managers can see any combination of reports in brief, edit their advanced settings, add or remove reports, drill down into the full report, export and print any section of the data.
