Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Classroom Spy in the enterprise?

We have long been searching for a piece of software that will let multiple users in our network view over the LAN what's running on one specific computer. This will save us licensing fees to run the same software (Flight Explorer) on all workstations. After a long search of various scenarios - split video signals going to multiple large-screen wall-mount monitors - we found and have decided upon a most unusual solution. We found a piece of software called Classroom Spy Professional. One of its many features is that it allows a master computer - the teacher - to push a video signal out to dozens of other computers over the LAN. The users can view that screen in a small window or on a second monitor.

This seems like a most unlikely piece of software to be used in a professional enterprise environment. Why? Because it is classified as spyware. I had to add an exception to our global anti-virus rules in Symantec AV Corporate. In fact this is the third piece of software I have had to add to the exceptions list. We use another piece of software called Track4Win to monitor the web sites our employees visit. The third piece is IPScan from Angry Ziber. It is a great little network tool that quickly allows the network admin to see all IP addresses in use in a subnet.

I wonder why Symantec classifies as spyware three great tools that help me do my job.

No comments: