Spector Pro - Software Review

Comprehensive tech news and reviews from GetConnectedMedia. This video focuses on the Spector Pro employee computer monitoring software.

Spector Pro - Software Review We’re going to take a moment to talk about the sensitive topic that’s about monitoring your employees or should I say monitoring what happens on the computers that you own inside of your business. Through technology we have the ability to see everything that goes on within the computers that your employees used. How do you do it? We’re going to look at the software today from SpectorSoft. They’ve made a few different programs, once called the Spector360 and the other is called the Spector 6.0 Pro. Let’s start with the 360. This is a server-base software so if you use networking in your office for example and you have a server then you can load the software onto the server and then load a client on each of the computers that connects to your network. What happens here is that the administrator now has the ability to look at what’s going on inside of the business and there are a couple of different views. If you take a look at here I've got the program up behind me, we kind of get a quick view which is a graphical representation of what’s going on inside the business. Here we can look at things like what are the most websites that the company computers are often going to. You know what are some of the online searches that are generally happening? You can look at sort of the global view of what’s going on and then you can also look specifically about what each computer is doing. It’s pretty simple to add computers to the network and once they’re added you can go into the specific computer. Here we have a look at what the administrator was doing on this computer. If you take a look there’s a number of different things we can actually look at. You know starting off with the screen snapshots. This is kind of interesting because it’s essentially like having a camera over the person’s shoulder. We simply just hit the play button and starting from a particular point in time you can go back a day or a week or even a month depending on when you install the software. It basically plays through what happened throughout the day. So if you want to you can sit down and you can actually look at what happened on that personal screen for the entire day that they worked and you can fast forward it and you can jump to certain dates. So if you knew that there was an incident that happened at a certain point in time you could certainly go to that point in time and look at what happened. But beyond that I’ll just close that Window for a second. There are quite a few other different views that you can have. For example you can look at things like email activity and this was just specifically show you all the emails that were sent to receive and looked at and what was typed and if you look down here it’s capturing all sorts of different email. It can capture web mail or it can even capture things like Outlook or any other program that you used. If you look at what websites were visited it will let us go through and look at specifically what time all the different sites that things happened. This one is very powerful. This is the chat and IM activity so here all the different chats whether it was on Instant Messenger or any other program are recorded to this and again you can look at that you’ve got the date and the time and you can simply go on to that conversation and have a quick look at what was said. Program activity is also another good one you can sort of see what programs are being used throughout the day so can see it’s almost playing games all day, Solitaire or whether or not they’re working inside business applications. You know overall you’ve got a number of different ways that you can look at information that has been done on the computers in your office. One thing I thought was interesting is you look at user activity. This one is kind of interesting because you can see in a snapshot what the sort of day or even week looks like in terms of when people started, when there was inactivity and when it ended. You know I looked at my week here and then it’s interesting because it just shows you that I usually get started this point in a day and I usually finished at that point of the day on the computer. It doesn’t capture anything that’s being done on paper and pen outside of it but if you want to know what’s going on inside the computers in your business it’s an interesting way to be able to capture that information. My recommendation if you’re going to use software like this full disclosure. Let the people in your business know that work machines are for work and that monitoring is taking place in order to protect them but also to protect you in your business. Once again the program is from SpectorSoft. We’re looking at the Spector360 version for the server but you can also get a standalone version just for the PC in which it will stayed Pro 6.0.