Can you log the use of a workstation?

[REM]

Hello,

We have a situation here that unfortunately, merits this question. The
situation; we have an employee that is claiming to spend many hours on
the weekend on their workstation, but we suspect that is actually not
the case. The question; is there a way to log the use of a user on the
workstation that they are working on?

TIA for your reply.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hello,

We have a situation here that unfortunately, merits this question. The
situation; we have an employee that is claiming to spend many hours on
the weekend on their workstation, but we suspect that is actually not
the case. The question; is there a way to log the use of a user on the
workstation that they are working on?

TIA for your reply.

The most obvious solution is to measure the output of the employee
in question. If he/she performs some work then there is supposed to
be some visible and measurable result.

A crude way of monitoring the PC would be to run a background
process once every ten minutes. This process would check if certain
applications, e.g. "Winword" or "Excel" are active at that time. This
batch file would do it:

@echo off
if not exist \\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs md \\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs
echo %date% %time% >> \\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs\%UserName%.txt
c:\tools\tlist.exe | find /i "winword" >>
\\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs\%UserName%.txt
c:\tools\tlist.exe | find /i "excel" >>
\\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs\%UserName%.txt
echo. >> \\SomeServer\SomeShare\Logs\%UserName%.txt

Note this:
- You must run the scheduled job under an account other then the employee's.
- The account used must have full access to the share used for the log file.
- The employee can easily falsify the log, by keeping Word and Excel running
all the time.