Three Part Blog Part III: Security and Employee use of the Internet In the previous article, we looked at liability issues related to employee use of the Internet. In this article we turn our attention to security concerns Management must understand when employees use company resources to access the Internet. Internet Security has become an umbrella term covering everything from identity theft to virus protection to using firewalls to keep outsiders out (except when you want them in). This article focuses on intentional as well as the inadvertent insider threat. One of our company’s q... [More]

Three Part Blog Part II: The Internet and Employee Liability In the previous article, we looked at productivity concerns related to employee use of the Internet. In this article we turn our attention to liabilities Management must consider when employees use company resources to access the Internet. So what new liabilities have you brought upon yourself since your company decided to connect to the ‘Net? The term “hostile workplace” conjures up images of screaming supervisors publically berating employees. Now, Sally walks past Fred’s cubicle and Fred has a clip from ... [More]

Three Part Blog Part I: The Internet and Employee Productivity Competitive enterprises exist to prosper and therefore must operate with efficiency. Corporate stakeholders are tasked to keep labor and material costs low, justify investment in capital and variable expenses and protect the enterprise from contingent and potentially crippling liabilities derived, for the most part, out of negligence (lawsuits, product recalls, negative publicity, physical and IT infrastructure damage and disrepair). We continue to hear that productivity gains are paramount to controlling inflation and keeping ma... [More]

Social networking Web sites focus on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms and postings and encourage users to share personal information and ideas via personal Web pages.  Unlike chat and IM which are temporary in nature, social networking sites are temporal, maintaining a history of communications, postings, and comments made at different times by different users.  Chatting is also available within the social networking sites.  Social networking websites have dramatically changed the way users interact with the Web. In the past, the Web w... [More]

Those Famous Dirty Words By pressing the "F3" key, Pearl Echo automatically searches the active log based on George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words". For more information on this topic, please see http://www.pearlsw.com/help/carlin.htm

Shortcuts You can right-click on any entry in a Pearl Echo Log Window to Quick LinkT to a site, restore data, update a control list or decode email attachments.

Reduce Bandwidth Usage You can eliminate flash content by enabling keyword blocking and adding .swf to your custom Words and Phrases Block list. If a site with flash needs to be accessed, simply add the site to your custom Web Allow list.

Auto-Refresh the Activity Log To automatically update the Pearl Echo Activity Log, select "Auto-Refresh" from the File menu. While in Auto-Refresh mode other Pearl Echo console features are unavailable. Press Alt+F5 to escape Auto-Refresh mode.

Increase the Startup Speed of the Pearl Echo Console When you log into the Pearl Echo Administration Console, Pearl Echo checks your cache directory in order to warn you if the cache file size exceeds your specified limit. This can be a time consuming task if you have tens of thousands of cache entries. Disabling this cache size check can greatly increase the Console's startup speed. To disable the cache size check, uncheck "Display Warning..." in the Content Cache Control command in the Options menu.

Acceptable Use Policy You can inform users of your Acceptable Use Policy by summarizing it in the Warning message box in Options menu. Your message can be a maximum of 256 characters