Employee Tracking: Is there a similar software to Elance WorkView or oDesk "Team Room"? [closed]

We are looking for a great commercial or free tool which can monitor all our remote employees and keep the reports centrally. We need it similar to Elance WorkView or oDesk "Team Room", what these tools do is:

• Take screenshots at random interval.
• Track the activity on computer based on key strokes. (not a necessity)

It doesn't necessarily need to track time but will be good to have, our aim is to monitor employees and make sure they're working - that's all.

I'll give oDesk Team Room 10/10 and I haven't been able to find such tool. Is there anyone who can suggest such tool?

Thanks

Solution 1:

To be honest, this sounds like you are having issues with your employees or that you suspect they are not working when they should.

Instead of increasing the monitoring of those employees, maybe you should talk to them and tell them about your worries. Make them aware of your thoughts and ask them how this could be solved.

Otherwise, they might be annoyed because of being monitored.

As far as my experience goes, something has proven very effective: thrust, documentation and reporting. When employees have to write documentation and reports about their work, they know that someone will have a look at it. This might annoy them too, but this might be not as bad as being monitored.

If someone would monitor my PC while working, I would switch to another job.

Solution 2:

I am a freelancer and when I am working on oDesk projects, whether fixed-price or hourly, I use the oDesk Team app, and there's nothing obnoxious about it like 2 other answers say. It's a great tool to help me track work. If I am switching to personal tasks, I can always turn off or pause the monitoring.

Since last one week I have been searching for and looked up tens of apps and here's a short-list of the ones with the best features similar to oDesk team. My platform is Linux Ubuntu on a laptop.

TimeDoctor.com - agent installer is a .run with encrypted content

WorkSnaps.net - java agent, requires JRE

Tahometer.com - agent installer is a .run with encrypted content

RescueTime.com - agent installer is a .deb with encrypted content

Due to paranoia, I haven't installed these on my production system, but on a temporary one. How I wish oDesk provided an offline/standalone version!