It205 / Monitoring Employees

Monitoring Employees on Networks

How does e-mail benefit an organization? Why might an organization want to limit how an employee uses e-mail during work hours? What is an e-mail’s path once it leaves an organization?

Having access to email within a company is beneficial in that communicating to others within the company is made a lot easier. For example, a memo can be sent out to everybody at one time, rather than wasting time and resources in printing it out to be distributed to the company. The last company that I worked for limited the use of email to company use only. All personal email websites such as yahoo and gmail were restricted, the webpages inaccessible. I'm sure there were those that used their company email account to send out personal emails, but anything confidential would be flagged by security and the message not sent.

What is the effect of instant messaging on organizational networks? What are benefits and drawbacks of using instant messaging in an organization?

Instant messaging has its pros and cons. It allows employees to communicate instantly without having to wait for an email reply back, but it can also slow down productivity as users may be more into chatting than actually performing any work.

What are benefits and drawbacks of web page and search engine use in an organization?

In my line of work, search engines and webpages are an excellent resource of information. There were times when troubleshooting that I could not find an easy for a user and had to search for the correct steps to use in order to fix the problems. There are those who would take advantage though, which is why security should be in place to limit and/or monitor which webpages are accessible from work. For example, we were unable to get to any email websites, social networking, or music sites.