1

Here is my problem. One of management wants to know how often a user is on his computer during the day. This user is our shop manager, basically he spends most of his day doing maintenance on equipment, company vehicles, and organizing equipment to be sent to job sites. He has a computer with email, internet, and software to track inventory. Manager says every time he goes out to the shop, this employee is sitting in his office on the computer.

So my question is, how do I track how often he is on his computer and possibly what he is doing while on the computer? It is a Windows XP machine.

Please move to proper group if this is not the correct one.

6 Spice ups
2

Awareness Technologies can monitor user activity.

1 Spice up
3

Probably use the event logs to figure it out…might take a little leg work.

You could also try some monitoring software like: http://www.remote-computer-spy.com/

4

There are a lot of monitoring software’s out there that will do just this. You could do a free 30 day trial instead of spending money on one. This will give you a month of knowing. We use http://www.spectorsoft.com

5

Otherwise go through history and see where he’s been.

6

If you are looking for a solution with no investment required go with activtrak http://www.activtrak.com it offers a wide variety of options and features you setup.

It will take timestamped screenshots, very detailed reporting, alerts and can even use the system to block or send messages to the user when trying to access a certain site or program.

The free version lets you track up to 3 computers and you can deploy it silently with their deployment software, works great.

This is what I use and love it.

1 Spice up
7

It’s free and it creates a nice log file that shows not only when he was on the computer but what files, programs, and where he went online.

Please note that we have an interactive logon message that restates our employee agreement that management has the right to monitor any and all employee activities while they are working.

1 Spice up
8

If you’re only looking at doing it for one user these quys are free for a basic account, and it’s very thorough software https://www.rescuetime.com/ The whole thing is geared towards measuring productivity, basically you create an account online and install the agent on the PC and it tracks what the active window is and how long it’s being used, if it’s a browser it tracks the site being viewed, and then applies an automatic score(which you can modify) between -2 & 2 based on productivity, and will give you an overall percentage of productivity & line graphs and the like.

9

Thanks for the options. Going to check a few of these out.

10

Try ActivTrak - free for 3 computers, fee for more.

11

SpectorSoft (another Spiceworks partner) can be used for this, they have a great tool for workstation activity monitoring.

1 Spice up