Small Business Tech

In this business climate it is important that your employees are as productive as possible. It is also no secret that a limited number of employees might spend a lot of time surfing the web. Many businesses are not in a position to setup a web monitoring system, and most do not want to become an electronic nanny. A quick solution to view employees surfing history if they have not deleted it is to use a couple of great utilities.

These utilities come from NirSoft which offer a multitude of computer utilities in addition to these two. Any of the utilities that I have used do not need to be installed so you can run them from a network share or a USB flash drive.

The utilities for listing browsing history are IEHistoryView and MozillaHistoryView. Each are downloaded as a small ZIP file. Uncompress the folders and then take them to the machine of the employee. You will not need to install either application, and you will be able to view the browsing history even if you are not logged in as the user.

The way that you switch user views does differ for each utility. In IEHistoryView for Internet Explorer you simply click on the head icon in the upper left hand corner. You can then choose the profile of your computer user. The MozillaHistoryView for the Firefox browser is not so straightforward. You will need to drill down to the history file location. The easiest way to do this is that when you change the history file location under the File menu be sure to note the original location. Your target location is probably the same except for the different user name.

Labels: browser, Firefox, Internet Explorer, security

I like the Firefox browser from Mozilla. It is fairly fast but still feature rich, but my favorite trick is the extensions. I thought that I would make a list of my must-have extensions.

Must-Have: They must be installed on a computer that I use more than once.

• IE Tab - Once in a while you have to use Internet Explorer for a web site. This plug in simply gives you the right-click option of viewing the page in Internet Explorer. You can save a list of frequent sites as well.
• Google Toolbar - My workflow revolves around Google Apps, so this is a must for me. It does much more than search including indicating if you have new email and listings your universal bookmarks.

Cool-To-Have: These just make using your computer more pleasant.

• Forecastfox - This small utility resides in the right-hand status bar showing you weather data for your chosen location. You get a small indicator if the National Weather Service has issues a warning for your chosen area.
• Cooliris - This is a fullscreen experience to looking at videos and images. Web sites have to be Cooliris capable, but the good news is that many popular sites are already on board.

Trying Out: Still in my personal testing phase.

• Tree Style Tab - This is an alternative to the tabs appearing across the top of your browser window. They appear in a bar on the left in a smaller format and broken in to hierarchical trees. Very handy if you are doing a lot of research.
  

Netbook only - Really useful on a netbook computer.

• Autohide - This extension allows you to choose the when and what disappearance of toolbars in Firefox when you use fullscreen mode on a netbook. Using fullscreen mode is a must for Firefox on a netbook, but it allows you to keep the status bar or even the taskbar available. The top bar slide down without resizing the page which is also nice.

There are lots of other extensions for Firefox. Some are mundane to making Firefox a completely different browser. Tell me about a few of your favorites.

Labels: extensions, Firefox, Google Apps

I recently took the opportunity to try out Portableapps. The premise of this collection of open source software is that you can use your software and store data on a thumb drive without leaving any personal information on the borrowed desktop computer. Each piece of software included is not trial software, but actually full-blown programs especially designed to operate from your portable drive.

You visit the portableapps.com web site and download the main suite. The executable program downloaded to your program will extract the main menu and applications onto your portable device. A thumb drive will probably be the most obvious choice, but you can also use a portable disk drive or even your iPod.

The base suite includes Open Office, Firefox, and a couple games and utilities. You can easily add more programs listed through the site. The choices are limited to open-source software. These full versions are free of any advertisements or spyware.

I tried Portableapps out on a new 1 gigabyte thumb drive. The main menu application starts up immediately when you insert the drive in a Windows computer. A simple menu pops up in the lower-right hand screen, and disappears to a tray icon when it is not being used.

I tried out a couple of Open Office applications as well as two versions of Firefox. Everything worked very well. Some extensions but not all worked in Firefox. The main problem was speed. The convenience of having my data and favorite applications close at hand were off set by an incredibly slow computing experience. I did not expect overwhelming speed, but it was sometimes difficult to use the applications do to waiting for actions to complete.

If you are looking for applications to use when you borrow someone else's computer try out portableapps. It seems to be the most-thought-out system that I have seen so far. Just be sure to bring your patience with your thumb drive.

Labels: Firefox, open source, portable