Blocking Employees from surfing the net

[Jallround]

why even have a computer you use to run your busyness on the net? the salons we have are not online EVER... if the employees have enternet, they would spend more time on that than work.. we use a dial up modem connected to the pc only for pc anywhere program for the office to check the system...we installed a switch on the phone line.. we call the store and tell them to hit the "switch" so we can dial the computer.. other than then the computer is never connected to anything else.. no virus ever and no need to worry about people sitting online rather than working...

[Andy]

MANY very positive things can be accomplished with Internet into the stores / salons ... BUT OF COURSE first you would want the appropriate controls and safeguards in place.

Employees should be locked out of unauthorized surfing.

Routers and/or Firewalls should be utilized together with high quality, uptodate AntiVirus programs.

Once the environment has the appropriate safeguards then the following optional components are available to you (talking Helios V11 here).

1. Helios Back Office ... allowing reporting and file maintenance
2. Email Broadcasting and individual client Emailing
3. eCommerce module to allow clients to purchase memberships and packages online
4. Credit Card Processing (FAST) online for both EFT and Daily POS Transactions
5. Helios WAN batching for multiple stores
6. Auto Remote Backup

just to mention a few ...

[GJMorrow]

Andy,

I am running Windows 2000 Professional, with Helios 11. Also, to be sure I am asking the right question, I am interested in NOT allowing anyone, except myself, access to the internet on the computer that Helios is operating. The only expection to this is that I have a streaming audio/video program which runs, at all times, so I can watch the salon activity from my home. I do not want to effect its operation.

Is this possible and how do I set it up?

Thanks again,

GJ Morrow

[CopperZone]

Password door from http://toplang.com/ works good for internet explorer and other programs. Now I need to figure out an easy way to lock documents.

[SwedaGuy]

I've got a great suggestion for keeping the employees from surfing the net...don't use Windows on your POS...

Keep it simple, use DOS (or whatever doesn't have a browser)...then if you want a win machine to surf on yourself, they don't need ANY access to it whatsoever...

[CyberTanned]

When I met my fiance i also took over the running of the salon...due to an easy accessible dial up connection her employees surfed and surfed recklessly downloading and visiting on-line casino sites and playing on messenger services...when I ran a housecall antivirus program (as suggested by microsoft tech support) it found 200 trojan horse viruses...on top of that, numerous spy and adware entries in the registry...I cant get rid of the viruses or the ad and spyware. We found to our great horror, that when we chose to "clean" infected areas, the viruses knocked out our tcp/ip settings...

goodbye helios hardware key..

everytime we opened helios 10 it said we did not have the right hardware key and we could only run in demo mode...of course my finace blamed ME for cleaning up and making it worse...I blame her employees for being so reckless and disrepectful of someone elses property.

Now...i access the net via DSL on a stand alone laptop that nobody else can access but us, and have made it clear that any employee attempting to or succeeding in accesing it will be instantly dismissed!

Our old system with Helios still runs but every now and then we get the bad hardware key message and have to restart helios....we are pending a new system where we can install Helios 11 but have not got the money to spend due to a slow season...

The bottom line is make sure employees are aware of disciplinary procedures and that internet access is forbidden..lock up the net...if they bypass the password then it is reasonable grounds for dismissal or any disciplinary procedure you deem appropriate...if they are warned and know the repurcussions of breaking the rules then they shouldnt test the rules...we learnt the hard way...that having a corrupt system and the salon software ON that corrupt system...your playing with fire...we got lucky...our database files were not infected but the system is still a mess!!

People dont seem to care anymore and its you, the salon owner that has to deal with the stress of downtime...and for us it was darn stressful!!! Because the surfing took place over many months before I took over we couldnt exactly blame anyone since there were sseveral of them doing it.

[Brandy1]

Easy, get online, your fired.

[Neon Beach]

Where was your anti-virus program??

[SwedaGuy]

I don't need any anti-virus on my POS...

[CyberTanned]

My fiance didnt have an anti virus program on the system..tut tut...we couldnt use our cd drive or our floppy drive to evacuate our dbase files and data files on helios not that a floppy disk would have been ANY use...I used a digital camera memory card as a flash memory device to copy the transaction files across to the laptop "safe house"...where all is well...scary stuff...