Speaking of offices or work environments where people use networked computers, there is a need, for the office manager or the administrator of the IT network, to have a monitoring system on those used computers, both for safety, and to have tighter control over what is done at work. Even when moving into a home environment, this need for control by one person over other family members may arise.
In several cases, a program such as TeamViewer that allows remote access to other computers, from one location, but to monitor the activities on other computers as a whole, without being manually and individually controlling them, may be useful. type of programs.
For the control of what is done on computers in a local network, those administrators who know the risks, both legal and technical, can use the free BlackBox Security Monitor program .
This monitoring software, downloadable for free after registering on the developer's website, allows you to check everything that is done on other PCs and to receive detailed reports, warnings and warnings.
It allows you to monitor the following activities in detail:
monitoring of websites visited while surfing the internet;
The programs used, open or closed;
searches made on the web;
e-mails sent and received on Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo MAil;
the keys pressed and all that is written to the computer using the keyboard (like a keylogger);
conversations made on chats and instant messengers such as MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger;
screenshots of the computer desktop.
The latter feature is very useful because it allows you to save the desktop of the controlled PC as an image, with a configurable periodicity or in the presence of some events.
Although I have not tested it within a real corporate network, trying it from a pc to check the activity of the other computer, I have found how this BlackBox is really a well-made tool, terrible for those who are controlled without his knowledge, which benefits the controller.
The interface design is very clean and easy to use.
At the first start, you are asked to specify the stations to be checked or registered users (if you want to try, you can check the activity done on the same computer by another Windows user).
For each PC added to the monitoring, you can specify which type of control it wants to be done, whether on internet browsing, on e-mail, on chat and so on.
You can always add / remove the computers you want.
From the advanced settings it is possible to exclude places, systems and users from the monitoring process, add specific websites and keywords inserted in the Email or chat with notification of warning in case the event occurs.
Summary reports can also be created after clicking on the report item in the left sidebar.
For example, you can know which programs are used most often, which sites you visit the most, the most active users in chat, who wrote the most Email messages and so on up to completely personalized reports.
Consult the guide to create a home business network to control computers.
Among the programs for recording activities, spying and controlling a computer, this is certainly the most solid and advanced compared to others.
If you intend to try it, BlackBox Security can be downloaded for free and works on Windows 7, XP and Vista, both 32 Bit and 64 Bit.
