In this program update there are not that many innovations, but it’s worth writing about it as well. It is made almost completely on the basis of joint work by programmers, the technical support department, and actual users of our programs.

In all the programs, we added the feature of capturing user’s messages in the VKontakte (vk.com) social network. Many users have asked me for this for a long time now.

The Ukrainian language was added to the programs’ interface. The translation was done by one of our users, so thank you very much to him.

We are continuing to work on improving the encrypting system for logs in Employee Monitor and Terminal Monitor. In extremely rare cases, it works incorrectly and greatly slows down the work of the program.

Thanks to reports like this from our users, we were able to solve the problem. In the next versions of the programs, we will be able to get rid of it completely.

We did not announce any changes we made in our programs for a long time while we were releasing new versions. Therefore, today we decided to hold a slight review and recall everything.

One of the most important updates was the development of a module for protecting financial information. This is a special script that automatically searches for lines in the program’s logs that are similar to credit card numbers, and deletes them from the monitoring journal. Screenshots made at that moment are also deleted.

These protective mechanisms work only in cases when this is possible and do not guarantee protection in absolutely all cases. The script is gradually being improved to minimize false alarms and errors. It cannot be turned off since its very existence carries out legislative norms.

For the programs Employee Monitor and Terminal Monitor, due to many requests from the users, a feature was added of configuring log storage in a local or network folder specified by the user.

A lot of work was done to improve the support of the latest versions of internet browsers (Opera, Firefox).

There was an improvement to message monitoring in Facebook, the social network.

The Turkish and Polish languages were added to the program interface.

We’ve released an update for Refog Employee Monitor and Terminal Monitor — 6.3.1.1129.

The update fixes minor bugs in the code of version 6.3.0 programs that occasionally occurred when opening monitoring logs. The program registration system has also been improved.

The main change, however, is a brand-new feature added after multiple requests we’ve received from users. The «Program Activity» table now has a button that generates a new program usage report for the selected user.

This report lists all the programs the user has worked in during the selected time period and the time spent in each of them. If you sort the table by the «Time used» column, for instance, you can instantly determine what programs were used most of all during the workday.

The collected data can be filtered in a number of ways and exported to a report in any of the supported formats (HTML, JPG, TXT, TIFF, Excel, PDF) by clicking the «Report» button.

As usual, the new versions are already available for download on our site. You can also update to them using the integrated program updater.

We’ve released a regular update for Refog Personal Monitor and Refog Employee Monitor — 6.2.4.1116.

The latest version accommodates to the latest changes in Facebook chat. Previous versions are no longer supported due to recent changes in the social network.

Also there are minor user interface fixes and an updated web browser tracking module that supports the latest version of Google Chrome.

If you have automatic updates disabled you can download the update manually from our web site.

A regular update version 6.2.2.1107 is available for Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor.

The main change is added support for Google Chrome. As well as minor error fixed and user interface tweaks.

If you have automatic product updates disabled you can download the update right from our web site.

We’re finishing up development of a new edition of Refog Employee Monitor designed specifically for terminal servers — Refog Terminal Monitor. Development had started in March 2010 and now we’re finally ready to unveil Terminal Monitor 6.2.0.1100.

Core features include:

• full support of Windows and Citrix terminal servers;
• storing all logs in a single encrypted storage;
• strong 256-bit AES and SHA (HMAC) algorithms are used to protect your data;
• ability to set log storage location;
• access restrictions for particular user groups (e.g. allow log access only for network security administrators);
• new log kinds and report formats including PDF, HTML and JPEG.

We’ve included all the features we had aimed for back in March. The software has passed thorough testing and is already available for purchase.

We have made a regular update of Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor programs to version 6.1.7.1044.

The main change compared with the previous version:

• Added support for different mail servers, including Hotmail and Live.com.

You can already download the new version of softwares from our website or simply wait until the program will remind about the update.

Today come regular software updates of Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor to version 6.1.6.1040.

You can download a new version of software from our web site or wait until the program automatically updates if you have this option enabled.

The main changes in the new version:

1. Optimization of software installation.

A lot of internal changes in the installer programs, made to accelerate and simplify their installation.

2. Reworked localization.

Fixed bugs and inaccuracies in translation of the programs into other languages.

3. Changed duration of the trial period.

Now the period of free trial use of the programs is 3 days for Personal Monitor and 30 days for Employee Monitor.

Development of Refog software is a continuous process: any detected errors in older versions are eliminated; releases of new products and updates of the old ones are prepared.

In this blog we’ll inform you about all the new products and added features and explain their purpose. Earlier the information about new features in the program was presented as a line of a text, but now it will be a detailed description with screenshots and videos.

Meanwhile you can see the development history of Refog Personal Monitor program from 2007 to the present date.

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At the moment we are working on a special version of Refog Employee Monitor, designed for usage on terminal servers. The working title of the program is Refog Terminal Monitor.

Terminal server — is a server that provides clients with computing resources to perform tasks. Technically, that is a very powerful computer connected on a network with terminal clients, which are usually represented by low-end workstations or specialized solutions for access to the terminal server.

Terminal servers from Microsoft and Citrix are used by many companies to organize users’ work.

Licenses for Refog Terminal Monitor will be issued based not on the number of computers, but on the number of the users of a terminal server (per user).

Depending on the settings made by the administrator, Terminal Monitor can notify users connected to the terminal server about monitoring.

The logs of users’ activity will be stored encrypted. An administrator will be able to customize storage location on the disk and the users eligible to view logs.

Refog Terminal Monitor will work only on server editions of MS Windows operating systems (both 32 and 64-bit) and will be designed to monitor the activity of all the users of a terminal server.

We are planning to release the program by the end of April or the beginning of May.