There’s a big drive now for companies to monitor and control their Internet feeds to the employees desk. It’s obviously not great business to have half your employees spending hour after hour Internet shopping, browsing Facebook or playing on line games. But before you rush off and spend thousands on installing the latest content filter you should consider some other options.
Blocking and restricting individual web sites can quickly become an administrative nightmare, if you block certain sites there is an implication that all others are ok for the workplace. Clearly you can’t monitor the entire Internet , but arguments and complaints are inevitable when you end up blocking some peoples favorite sites and not others. A help desk can soon find themselves dealing with lots of calls asking to unblock, block different websites.
There’s also the risk of the technical minded users rising to the challenge to beat internet filtering, it only takes one to discover how to circumvent your filters before everyone finds out. It is often much simpler to introduce a simple Acceptable Use policy and allow users to access their personal sites in their own time – lunchtimes and breaks for instance. A grown up approach enforced by informing users that all access is logged is usually enough to control most environments.