MONITORING SOFTWARE BLOG

Employee monitoring software by SoftActivity offers extended compatibility for international users and support for 64-bit Windows.

New Westminster, BC – Deep Software Inc., developer of Activity Monitor, announced the release of Activity Monitor version 4.3. Activity Monitor provides organizations of all sizes with an easy-to-use and affordable set of employee monitoring tools.

“This release further boosts Activity Monitor’s industry-leading features,” said Yuri Martsinovsky, CEO of Deep Software. “Activity Monitor is now available in 11 languages. A newly developed state-of-the-art keylogger enables the recording of text typed in any language including full support for the IMEs used in languages such as Japanese and Chinese and the accented characters used in Spanish and French.”

This latest version of Activity Monitor also introduces support for the 64-bit Editions of Windows Vista(tm) and Windows XP(tm) and support for deployment via Active Directory.

Employee monitoring has become a business necessity. In the UK, employee use of social networking websites, such as Facebook, is estimated to cost organizations £6.5 billion (around $15.5 billion USD) per year and consume up to 20% of their bandwidth. Despite the enormity of the problem, many businesses are unsure how to deal with it.

“It would appear that most CISO (chief information security officer) and IT directors loathe social networking sites and if they had their way would ban them completely, but what is also coming across loud and clear is that the HR departments actually welcome the use of these sites – so there is a lot of internal pushing and shoving going on between HR and IT over how best to manage these sites.”, said Claire Sellick, director of the event InfoSecurity Europe.

SoftActivity’s Activity Monitor provides a solution to the problem. Organizations can to continue to allow their employees to reap the business benefits of social networking sites while protecting themselves against the costly lost productivity that can result from excessive non work-related use. Additionally, Activity Monitor also helps organizations identify and prevent intellectual property theft and fraudulent activity.
Activity Monitor 4.3 is available today from SoftActivity’s website and through channel partners. For more information, please visit: www.softactivity.com.

About Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor’s extensive range of features includes remote desktop viewing, internet usage monitoring, application usage monitoring, keystroke recording and much more.
Activity Monitor enables an organization to protect its sensitive and proprietary information, protect its employees, protect its reputation and, ultimately, protect its bottom line. Activity Monitor is available on Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and Windows Server 2003.

About Deep Software Inc.
Based in New Westminster, BC, Canada, Deep Software Inc. specializes in the development of security products and web analytics software for large enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, as well as home PC users. Activity Monitor is developed by SoftActivity, a division of Deep Software Inc.

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Deep Software Inc.
#250-625 Agnes St.
New Westminster, BC
Canada, V3M 5Y4
Contact Us via Online Support Center

• new: Activity Monitor keylogger supports most international keyboard layouts now! Our keylogger records, in addition to English keystrokes, any characters in Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and recognizes accented characters in such languages as German, Spanish and Portuguese, for example.
• new: Keystrokes tab in real time monitoring shows program and window name where text has been typed.
• new: saving of keystrokes tab in .rtf format with preserved colors and fonts
• improved: update of large Agents list does not take much CPU and does not freeze Activity Monitor. This allows to work with lists of computers as large as several hundreds.
• improved: naming of computers in list. Agent name in list renamed into Description. Computer name, host name or IP address is shown in list instead. To view description, switch to Details mode and enable this column. User can change only Description, and not Name.
• new: “Don’t resolve host names to IP addresses” setting in Activity Monitor Options. Allows to turn off resolving for the network setups where it resolves incorrectly. For example, in some types of VPN, all hostnames are resolved to the same IP address according to user reports
• new: Quick Start tutorial has been included. Opens when Activity Monitor is started first time
• new: support of different international encodings in emails. Activity Monitor will correctly display emails that use any international encoding
• fixed: computers sometimes duplicated in list
• fixed: Enter Agent Password command is not available for the remote computers in offline state
• improved: scheduled collection of logs. Download windows do not pop up if Activity Monitor is minimized
• fixed: users list in Log Viewer was empty in some cases
• fixed: work time in applications was recorded incorrectly after system time change
• improved: shows when active program opens new window or window caption changes. For example, it now records when programs open “Save As…”, “Enter Password” window or web browser’s title changes for different websites
• fixed: Log Viewer correctly shows activity for users/computer with names containing non-English characters

• improved Get Agent Log functionality;
• formatting code removed from text messages in AIM and Yahoo messenger;
• copy to clipboard From/To/Subject fields for emails;
• password field in Activity Monitor Options shows as empty if no password is set;
• other improvements and bugfixes;

• works on Windows Vista now; does not support Windows 98 anymore.
• record email sent and received by users. Includes POP3/SMTP mail using email client software
• record chat conversations in instant messengers. Supports MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, IRC. Both sides of all conversations are recorded;
• new format of log files
• SoftActivity Log Viewer for viewing recorded logs
• Central Log Database for keeping recordings from all computers in one location
• Automatic collecting of logs and screenshots from all computers. Collection schedule can be adjusted.
• Refreshed program look
• improved support of international characters

• Support for multi-monitor computers. Activity Monitor now shows whole virtual screen for such computers on screenshots and in monitoring window.
• Fixed: Option “Offline Logging – Delete log file and start new one” did not save properly
• Fixed: Rare problems when working under or monitoring Windows users with limited access rights

• Fixed: rare crash in Agent that caused loss of connection with Activity Monitor

• Activity Monitor now records websites visited in all browsers. Previously worked only with IE
• Minimize to system tray option. Allows you to keep Activity Monitor open for a long time without having its button in task pane
• Improved: If screenshots from remote systems are copied by schedule, no file-overwrite or file-not-found prompts appear
• Remote installation of Agent improved. If a non-administrator user is logged on the remote computer, no message is displayed to him and Agent installation succeeds. Monitoring of this user can start right away
• Improved support of Fast User Switching on Windows XP. If the user has switched to other account Activity Monitor switches to monitoring of this active account
• Fixed: Sometimes offline screenshots were taken even if computers was not used, creating a lot pictures of screensaver, for example
• Improved: when Activity Monitor reopens monitoring windows on startup it also restores screen zoom and autorefresh state. Basically, if you were monitoring several computers and then closed Activity Monitor you will continue from same place when you open Activity Monitor next day.
• New: “Delete log file and start the new one when size limit reached” option in Offline Logging settings
• New: Actions on multiple computers. Send instant message, restart, shut down, run command, etc. on all selected computers at once.