Monitoring internet use at work

Psychofly

OpenDNS is a very good solution and helps not just in this sort of thing but is also a faster DNS lookup than many ISPs will provide. It's a very well regarded and very well respected DNS option and one that the majority of my friends and colleagues use at work and at home. I wouldn't be without it to be honest.

As for monitoring use I may be wrong but I think you'll have to watch what you do from a legal point of view. As far as I'm aware you'll need to make people aware that monitoring is taking place and get them to sign up to an acceptable use policy which you can then enforce after that.

isofa

Do the PCs all connect to/through a server? If so a proxy server would be ideal, don't allow access via anything else other than your proxy, and lock the desktops down properly.

If not then you need to look at traffic monitoring on each PC, or lock each down properly, prevent access to a black list, and on the most basic lever you could regularly look through the cache, but you'd need to tell staff you are doing this, otherwise you'll find yourself in court.

Or talk to your staff, educate them etc. Social networking can boost business productivity, business nertworking etc. Simply banning it will make you unpopular and staff unhappy.

Put it this way, if you have staff who will waste time, they'll waste it on Facebook or just faffing with paperwork they don't need to do, it's about the person, not the technology.

kwikbreaks

Jaffa. wrote: »

So all your information would first go through OpenDNS' server... Mmm

Only DNS requests.

Indeed_2

Leg-end wrote: »

What is the best product for monitoring internet use? We have a few PC's at work and we want to monitor what sites are visited, how long for and how often.

We do not want to be too big brother but we would prefer is certain sites were not used. Trust is a marvellous thing but if we have a programme or software that records use we hope it will stop the 'wrong type' of sites being visited. We would of course implement this with a usage policy.

It sounds to be a good idea. Since we use employee monitoring software, the employees have really improved their work.
Unfortunately, I can't give you any tips on a particular piece of software, because our company uses Mac OS. We have ActyMac DutyWatch installed on all the computers in the office, it's an application for recording internet usage history, keystrokes, etc.

Knub

Sounds like a mixture of SurfControl and openDNS will do what you want.

Ariana

Cyclope Employee Surveillance is a non-invasive employee monitoring solution that provides you valuable statistics related to the employee activity: websites visited, applications, documents accessed, chat partners, etc and active time spend on each of them. productivity reports are also available, and, most important is not breaking the employees privacy (does not record the content, but the activity). View the online demo of the solution from their website (cyclope-series)

[Deleted User]

Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration Server

http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/edgesecurity/isaserver/en/us/overview.aspx

savemoney

Ariana

:spam: link in signature arent allowed

Ariana

Sorry, I have just removed it

mr_fishbulb

Leg-end wrote: »

We do not want to be too big brother but we would prefer is certain sites were not used. Trust is a marvellous thing but if we have a programme or software that records use we hope it will stop the 'wrong type' of sites being visited. We would of course implement this with a usage policy.

I think it would be best to develop a policy first and get buy-in from your top boss. This will mean you implement a solution which "the business" wants, not just what the IT people think it should have.

All employees should sign up to this policy if you are going to enforce it.

Once you have identified exactly what you want to achieve in the policy, then look for the tool to do it.

By all means, use something like openDNS as part of a data-gathering exercise before hand. That way you have some facts you can take to your top boss to support your ideas for the policy.