Small businesses who want to make sure that employees are making the most of their day now have a new service to turn to. Intego, a Seattle-based company that specializes in security software, announced its new Flexivity product, which makes it easy for small business owners to manage a fleet of Macs that their employees use for work.
Flextivity works in two parts: the first is a client on the employees’ Macs that will monitor their computer activity and apply security policies; while the second is a cloud service that allows business owners and other administrators to set policies for their employees and view reports about what they’re up to.
That reminds us a bit of another Seattle startup: RescueTime.
Intego CEO Jeff Erwin said that his company created the service after hearing from small business owners that they didn’t know what their employees were doing all day, and they were concerned about lost productivity.
“It’s designed in such a way so that employers can work with their employees around best practices for what can and can’t be done during work hours,” he told GeekWire in an interview.
The service has a wide and diverse set of features that administrators can take advantage of, including the ability to only apply certain policies while a user is connected to one network, selectively apply policies to particular users, and even take screenshots of an employee’s computer when certain conditions are met.
“There’s a ton of different features and capabilities in the product, the intent is not for any individual business owner to use all of them,” Erwin said.
Flextivity’s content monitoring capabilities might be the service’s flashiest feature, but it also handles security policies, which include setting virus scan intervals, and the level of firewall protection applied to each client machine.
Those security policies can be an important step towards protecting a business from viruses, malware and other outside attackers. Especially in industries that require people to handle sensitive data, security policies can be a key to safety.
Companies that already have a security solution from another provider can continue to manage some policies through that solution and others through Flextivity.
As it stands, workers will have to trust the small business owner to be open about their policies. Intego strongly encourages that administrators deal with their employees in an up-front manner, but there’s no way for an employee to specifically tell when Flextivity monitoring is running and when it isn’t. (Flextivity’s icon shows up in a Mac’s menu bar whenever it is applying any policy, not just surveillance.)
With all of the system’s capabilities, it’s possible that unscrupulous employers could use Flexivity to surreptitiously keep tabs on their employees at all hours of the day. But Erwin said that there are other software packages that would allow more secretive monitoring.
“We’re not trying to create a spying device, though you could certainly construe it as that, but it’s designed to allow employers and employees to work together and create best practices,” Erwin said.
In the future, Erwin said that the company would consider allowing employees the ability to review their activity on their own through Flextivity cloud-based dashboard. Right now, people who want to see how they spend their day will have to go over their habits with an administrator.
