Attention all Vantage customers (and triallers). We've just released build 2.2.0.8 as an auto-update. This build includes new features such as scheduled data purge, support for Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, and scheduling CSV imports into your Organizational structure.
A great feature of Vantage Ultimate is its ability to publish reports and storages to the Web Module so that users can login, view their reports, and analyze data. But no one wants to have to remember yet another username and password combination to login to the Web Module, so make it easy on your users by using Windows Authentication. This way, as long as a user is logged into their Windows machine with their Windows domain username, they will sail straight into the Web Module without being prompted for a username or password.
The benefits of allowing employees monitored Internet access, instead of extensive blocking and filtering, have been explored in previous blogs. In essence, an effective monitoring solution will assist in maximizing employee productivity, identifying download issues, improving network management and minimizing litigation risks. Something of great importance is taking the users of the network you intend [...]
We recently completed the analysis of our latest software user survey. It is always very exciting to review the results from such a survey since it is one of the best indications on why clients are using our software, where our strengths lies and what we can improve. […]
I just came across something I wanted to share. Socialnomics.com recently posted a very powerful video, “Social Media Revolution”, highlighting figures from Erik Qualman’s book on how social media transform the way we live and do business. Being a part of industry, it comes as no surprise that the popularity of social media is rapidly [...]
Using Date Modifiers in file masks are a great way to increase the speed of your imports as they remove all the logs you don’t care about from the import list. If you're using WebSpy Vantage, you are probably interested in filtering your log file imports by date (only import files from the month of June for example). The obvious way to do this is to specify a date filter using the filters page in the Input Wizard. The problem is Vantage will still check every record in every log file being imported to see if it matches the date filter. If you have months or years worth of logs in the folder being imported, that's a lot of data that Vantage has to pointlessly sift through. The good news is, if your log files contain the date in their file name, then you can use file masks to instruct Vantage to never touch these unwanted files.
Here's a video I put together demonstrating how to get up and running with a complete monitoring and reporting solution in less than 15 minutes. The video demonstrates three products: WebSpy Sentinel, for complete data capture, WebSpy Live for real time alerts, and WebSpy Analyzer Standard for analysis and reporting.
A few customers have experienced some issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text format using Microsofts MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006. We've therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.
I was conducting a demonstration the other day on how to use a few tricks in WebSpy Vantage to filter out noise and clutter from web reports. If you have ever looked through the raw list of web sites visited by people in your organization, I'm sure you know what I mean. Watching a single video on YouTube will probably generate a list of about three to five sites such as lax-v41.lax.youtube.com, www.youtube.com, img.youtube.com, and so on. Your list of top sites also probably contains hits to ad servers and tracking servers, such as doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com and imrworldwide.com. All this clutter gets in the way of determining what sites were 'intentionally' visited.
The year was 1996 and young(ish) CEO, Jack Andrys, was racking his brain to come up with the perfect name for his business. It was the early stage of the Internet evolution with a shy number of 36 million users, 0.9% of the population. Not much compared to today’s staggering number of 1,596 million users, [...]