Description:
Pearl Software's Cyber Snoop 3.0 lets the small business system administrator monitor and restrict the Web activities of their PC users. This utility provides a powerful array of auditing and filter features, plus good reporting capabilities. Once Cyber Snoop is installed on a system, administrators will need to spend some time configuring it. In testing, we found the spreadsheet-style interface convenient for adding or restricting specific Web sites. (One timesaving feature is the ability to import a text file of permissible or impermissible sites.) You can also filter Web content according to the PICs rating system. Another useful ability is that you can also add specific words that will be restricted. (You could, for example, stop block e-mail messages from being sent that have "job" or "resume.") The product also lets you customize the message shown to the user when a violation occurs. What's impressive here is that Cyber Snoop not only logs Web sites visited, but also e-mail, ftp and chat rooms--virtually every Web access by PC users. Besides logging URLs and users, the product will recover the actual Web page content (and e-mail or chat message) sent. Reporting is done in a spreadsheet, which lets you sort by a variety of criteria. The product also exports to text (or HTML) for use with other packages. Monitoring employee Web activity is a fact of life for most businesses today, and Cyber Snoop provides a good range of features that are both unobtrusive for the user and quite powerful for the administrator. --Richard Dragan
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