Question for anyone who works in an IT department

[philelmer]

We've just had a round of appraisals at work, and one of the overriding themes of a lot of us has been "use the internet less". I'm no stranger to technology but I'm also not proud to say i don't really know much about office network software.

What are the more common ways of determining when a computer is being used to surf the internet? If I leave messenger logged in all the time does that flag me up as a high user? What about if I leave Gmail as my primary window while I'm away doing a job for 3 hours?

My computer is always available to be online, like, i assume, every other DSL-type connection is, so how do the IT nazis (apologies to the very IT nazis that i hope can answer this question) know how much time I am actively online?

Cheers in advance.
Phil

[softtop]

The number of internet pages that were visited during the time period indicates activity, leaving a page open would not be considered usage.

[selwonk]

Unless it's an AJAX (or similar) enabled page that constantly polls client <--> server for new content...

[_dobbo_]

The likelehood is in an office environment that you are accessing the internet via a proxy server - either a visible one (which can be seen under Tools->Internet Options->Connections->Lan Settings->Proxy server) or a transparent one.

In either case, whatever you look at is probably being logged, and can be reviewed.

In the absence of either of these, then the only check I'm aware of is your browser cache. Actually monitoring people tends in my experience to only happen in the event that you are already in trouble... In which case they are probably monitoring email too.

Maybe a pointy haired boss has just walked around and seen a lot of internet use, and got a bee in his/her bonnet about it?

[aldi]

Depending what software they're using yes, messenger can rack up the totals quite a bit.

[Tripps]

I've noticed bored IT manager types like to try out the latest evaluations of monitoring tools to see who is doing or using what.

At one place I'd worked for they resisted the MDs requests to send out an e-mail to the whole company shoiwng the worst users and where they browse. It was much to our amusement when they finally gave in and the MD was top of the charts with late-night theme to his favourite sites! Needless to say no restrictions were put in place after that

[_deejay_]

aldi said:

Depending what software they're using yes, messenger can rack up the totals quite a bit.

That's true, but it depends on how they 'count' usage. Messenger is the highest used Internet application at my place of work, if you count page hits/requests. However, it's one of the lowest if you consider bandwidth. That's simply because it polls.

[aldi]

_deejay_ said:

aldi said:

Depending what software they're using yes, messenger can rack up the totals quite a bit.

That's true, but it depends on how they 'count' usage. Messenger is the highest used Internet application at my place of work, if you count page hits/requests. However, it's one of the lowest if you consider bandwidth. That's simply because it polls.

Yep was thinking about ones where they try to measure the length of the browsing sessions by looking at the length of time between requests, messenger tends to make the totals look massive unless you drill down and figure it out. Not that spending all day with messenger open is nececarily any better than surfing!