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.

Company managers and program designers have understood for a quite long time that monitoring staff activities can seriously, and without major expense, increase their productivity and responsibility.

This has also been strengthened by the fact that the main activities of office workers are almost totally connected to computers and the internet and that together with new capabilities there have also appeared a large number of temptations (social networks, various messaging services, on-line games) and dangers (viruses, hacks and fraud).

Already by 2007 the program Employee Monitor, which we developed, made it possible to evaluate the efficiency of staff monitoring and to save and analyse logs of their work on the computer.

Large companies took (and continue to take) great interest in corporate monitoring systems. For example, one of the 7000 patents, obtained by Microsoft in 2008, described a staff biometric monitoring system.

The patented system approached the problem of monitoring from quite a different angle, however it was less ethical and legally unambiguous. Its description mentioned a set of wireless sensors controlling heart beats, temperature, pressure, brain activity rhythm and even staff facial expressions.

Using analysis of the collected data, the system should automatically detect stressful situations, psychological distress, negative emotions and even incompetence. This patent caused quite a stir in the media and trade unions, but the public did not hear any comments from Microsoft or see a model of the patented device. Today, such biometric systems are still only used in the aviation and space industries and in fire fighting.

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.