Clearly, online connectivity can beguile a worker away from their assigned duties. This distraction can severely diminish an employer's profit margin and place the company's solvency at risk. StaffCop, an employee monitoring software, can help keep employees productive.
Established in 2001, AtomPark Software develops StaffCop. The employee monitoring software assists businesses in improving their workforce's productivity while also protecting their digital and intellectual property from the peering eyes of the competition.
Once considered a privilege, internet-connectivity is now a requirement for the majority of work environments. StaffCop tracks an employee's online activities by taking a screenshot image of the worker's desktop. Additional online network monitoring elements include email, internet, chat and instant message surveillance.
Managers can view websites their employees have visited. StaffCop records the website address, time of access and page titles. Moreover, the employee monitoring software captures web searches. This collected data could help determine if an employee is actually working or spending their time surfing instead. The app's network monitoring components could be a valuable asset to businesses of all sizes.
The email monitoring feature intercepts all sent and received communications. It records both plain text and HTML formats.
The email monitoring feature intercepts all sent and received communications. It records both plain text and HTML formats. StaffCop is compatible with most major email applications. However, the employee monitoring software has questionable support for web-based email exchanges. To capture the contents of these types of exchanges, supervisors may need to check the employee monitoring software's logs for captured screenshots and keyboard strokes.
In testing, the taking of screenshots significantly slowed and even froze both the monitored and monitoring computers intermittently. Screenshots were often poor quality and loaded slowly.
StaffCop only monitors an employee's activity. It has no blocking or filtering capabilities. The network monitoring app cannot prevent an employee from accessing pornography, gaming, social networking and job search websites.
The network monitoring application captures both sides of chat and instant message conversations. Supported applications include ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and other common messengers.
The software has a robust keylogger that captures every keyboard stroke. It records the Shift, Ctrl, PrtScrn, Caps Lock and others. Moreover, the keylogger collects usernames, passwords and other types of sensitive information.
StaffCop monitors worker-launched computer applications. Managers can analyze the amount of time their employees spend in various work-related applications as well as time spent playing solitaire or other computer games.
The software has excellent document tracking capabilities. StaffCop monitors file creation, reading, modification, deletion and transfers to external drives such as USB and other portable devices.
StaffCop's computer system monitoring features include PC startup and shutdown, user login and logout as well as software installations.
Alert message sending allows supervisors to send their subordinates private messages when they observe questionable activities. The feature is also useful for alerting employees to network issues, virus contaminations, building maintenance problems or other urgent communications.
StaffCop has no remote PC command capabilities. Perhaps in future releases the manufacturer will consider implementing some type of remote control system such as remote shutdown, reboot, browser control, application control and more.
The employee monitoring software has vast reporting features. Reporting can occur via a local network or can be emailed to a supervisor's email account.
Reports are highly customizable. Creating employee groupings that track the activities of different organizations within the company is an uncomplicated task.
StaffCop can provide information about your company's email traffic, online browsing behavior and more. Moreover, managers can obtain information about the organization's most frequently launched applications and overall computer activity.
StaffCop reliably captures an employee's keyboard strokes. Additionally, it is an adequate employee monitoring software for tracking online behaviors and general PC activities. Omitted from this application are filtering, scheduling and blocking capabilities.
Pros
StaffCop reliably captures a user's keyboard strokes.
Cons
StaffCop has intermittent performance problems.
The software can demonstrate an employee's work ethic.