PC Monitoring Program - Guide to Monitoring Program

If you are looking to have a PC Monitoring program and wondering what features it must have, this article for you. But remember having a parental monitoring software is just one part of a picture in creating a safe internet experience. Internet safety starts with educating children and oneself on internet.

Following is the list that every monitoring program should have.

Website Activity Logging: PC monitoring program must log all website address (urls) including blogs and social networking sites. Monitoring program must be compatible with almost all the web browsers, major among them are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, American Online, Netscape, Opera.

Email Monitoring: PC monitoring software must come with an ability to monitor email sent and received regardless whether email service is based on POP3 (Outlook, Outlook etc…) or web based such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc…, because most of the viruses are spread through emails.

Keystroke Recording: Another feature that PC monitoring program should have is the ability to detect and log the program in which the keystrokes were typed in a manner that automatically formats the backspaces, enter keys, deletes so that data captured is easy to read.

Internet Conversation Logging: PC monitoring software must be able to log both sides of conversation happening on any Instant Messenger or Chat Rooms. This include AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger etc…

Invisibility: Another feature that pc monitoring program must have is the ability to run in steal or undetected mode. It should even be hidden from add/remove program, start up menu, task manager. Invisibility provides full control to parents in a way that no one except parent can delete or disable the monitoring program.

Screenshot Recording: pc monitoring program must come with an ability to capture screenshots at specific intervals. Even better, it should not only have the ability to record screenshots of specific programs, but also display it to parents in a video slide show with play and stop controls.

Event Trigger: PC monitoring program should be able to initiate monitoring based on a certain word typed in or appeared during conversation.

P2P Monitoring: Children use P2P based programs such as Kaaza (prime source of spyware) to download anything that ranges from inappropriate pictures, videos, pirated software or videos. Monitoring software should log the details of what files are shared, uploaded or downloaded using peer to peer software.

Remote Access: In order to view all internet activity of their children, parents have to log on to that actual computer which their children use. Remote feature provides parents the facility to view all the internet activity of their children from any other computer with an internet connection, and even allows remotely to take full control of their child computer .

Alert: PC monitoring software must send parents an alert probably through email, sms or on phone when it finds out that their children is involved in an activity that would harm them.

Time Schedule Having the ability to limit the access of the children’s internet usage is a feature that’s not part of the monitoring per say, but it’s nice to have.

Monitoring software compensates all the weakness of the internet filter software, but it does not replace internet filter. Its recommended to use monitoring software with internet filter, or better still use a true parental control software that have both the filtering and monitoring capability. WebWatcher is one of them, you can read my review on WebWacher by clicking here. You can also read my review on I am big brother, which is on my view is the best affordable monitoring software available in the market.

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