the viewsender path and promise · web viewnovember 12, 2009 [viewsender usage examples]the...

TWO’S COMPLEMENT, LLC

V I EW S E ND E R US A G E EX A M P L E S

VE R SI ON 1 . 0 0 - NO VE MBE R 2 0 09

May 7, 2023 [VIEWSENDER USAGE EXAMPLES]

Cover page

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Sexual harassment lawsuit................................................................................................................................................5

The situation............................................................................................................................................................................ 5

Current technology............................................................................................................................................................... 5

The viewSender solution....................................................................................................................................................6

2. Disgruntled workers claim retroactive overtime....................................................................................................7

The situation............................................................................................................................................................................ 7



3. The office Radar O'Reilly....................................................................................................................................................8

The situation............................................................................................................................................................................ 8



4. The accounting clerk/eBay retail magnate..............................................................................................................10

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 10

Current technology.............................................................................................................................................................10

The viewSender solution.................................................................................................................................................10

5. Romeo and Juliet................................................................................................................................................................. 11

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 11



6. He's here, so he must be working................................................................................................................................12

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 12



7. Look harder when there's something to see...........................................................................................................13

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 13



8. Backup auditing...................................................................................................................................................................14

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 14


2 1. Sexual harassment lawsuit | ©2006-2009 Two's Complement, LLC.

[THE VIEWSENDER PATH AND PROMISE] May 7, 2023


9. Training and testing...........................................................................................................................................................16

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 16



10. Sensitive investigations.................................................................................................................................................18

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 18



11. Court-ordered, mandated or anticipated compliance requirements........................................................19

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 19



12. Due process/best practices..........................................................................................................................................20

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 20



13. Inappropriate associations and patterns...............................................................................................................21

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 21



14. Bottlenecks and chokepoints......................................................................................................................................22

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 22



15. Disaster recovery/IT support.....................................................................................................................................23

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 23



16. Outsourced services provider.....................................................................................................................................24

The situation......................................................................................................................................................................... 24



17. Pre-empting plagiarism.................................................................................................................................................25


©2006-2009 Two's Complement, LLC. | 1. Sexual harassment lawsuit 3


1. SEXUAL HARASSMENT LAWSUIT

THE SITUATION

Susan R., a long-time employee with a solid work history, has alleged sexual harassment in a lawsuit against her employer within a few months of being assigned a new male supervisor. She alleges that previous oral and e-mail complaints directly submitted to the supervisor have been ignored, and that her complaints to HR have resulted in a "he said, she said" discussion where the supervisor's denials were accepted at face value.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

If the potential damages and other circumstance warrant it (usually where other employees have also come forward), plaintiff's attorney will try to compel discovery through the company e-mail systems and other conversational records and documents - when that fails as overbroad, they are usually successful seeking forensic examination of computer hard drives belonging to the specific individuals and witnesses involved.

Forensic hard-drive examination is problematic on several levels. First, it is extremely disruptive for the company and the individuals because those hard drives or computers must be replaced and their contents reconstructed in order for the employee to continue doing their jobs.Secondly, information stored statically on a hard drive rarely has complete context (background information useful for determining its value or meaning).

There are three common examples I use to illustrate the problem. The first is a case where a document is passed around for editing. It is impossible to reliably reconstruct a from a single image of a static file a document in the form it was originally received once it has been edited and replaced back into the same file. The second example is where a friend of yours has sent you a dirty joke as an attachment to an e-mail. You choose not to read the joke at work (or perhaps ever), but you forward the e-mail to your home or personal e-mail account. The problem is that the entirety of the original e-mail, including the dirty joke attachment, is now stored on your hard drive in various ways (temp file, cache, history, and e-mail backup). There is no record whether you did or did not read that attachment on company time (some e-mail systems may record whether you clicked on an e-mail, but not how much time you spent reading it or whether you opened or saved attachments). The assumption that will be made by the adversarial attorney is that you in fact are responsible for all of the negative content on your hard drive, regardless of source or your own actions (actions you can neither prove or disprove).

The third example concerns the amount of information displayed on a computer screen. Only a small percentage of most Web sites, documents, images, and certainly animated movies, can appear totally within the small area of a computer screen. Since a static image of your hard drive file contains no scrolling, mouse click, or keystroke information to say where you went in a file or how long you stayed there, it is not possible to know (or defend yourself against) how much of that document you did or did not see, much less absorb. But again, hard drive forensics examination tends to hold the hard drive owner responsible for the entirety of the files stored on the hard drive -



for shared computers where files are stored by many users into common areas of the hard drive, the situation becomes much more complicated.

THE VIEWSENDER SOLUTION

viewSender records only what actually appears on the screen (contents that can more reasonably be assumed to have been viewed if a user is known, through keystrokes and mouse-clicks, to be present). It records very accurately view and activity timestamps, and reduces all text on the screen into searchable text files. If an attachment was actually opened on that computer, viewSender would have recorded the window displaying the attachment (assuming reasonable monitoring settings), and snapshots before and after it was opened to establish a timeframe. Unique text within a captured image can be searched for other occurrences within the captured information for that computer, as well as for other computers - which means you can trace the progress and distribution of an item as it coursed its way through an organization. Investigations involving viewSender records can be done at the viewSender Server and do not require any disruption or removal of the monitored computer(s).

But viewSender's capabilities at trial, no matter how superior, pale in comparison to the three things it can do no forensic hard drive analysis ever will: detect, investigate and help mitigate a workplace situation before any lawyer becomes involved. viewSender (with a proper keyword list) would have detected the e-mail complaints submitted to the supervisor as well the conversations between the complainant and her co-workers about the supervisor's behavior. It quite likely would have detected other hot-button text items that would have indicated a potential problem before any formal complaint was submitted (suggestive, leading, denigrating or insensitive keywords in the supervisor's e-mails or other computer-based communications).

This ability to detect potentials and take pre-emptive action is incredibly valuable - the damages to an organization, including actual and hidden costs, can be extreme and last for years, resulting in lost production, morale issues, loss of valuable employees, and inability to attract qualified replacements, in addition to the monetary costs. When failure to anticipate or correct problems involves employees still on the job and results in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission actions or a civil lawsuit, the problems are exacerbated because usually the offended (and sometimes the offender) are protected from dismissal, discipline or other corrective action until the matter is settled legally.



2. DISGRUNTLED WORKERS CLAIM RETROACTIVE OVERTIME

THE SITUATION

Thirteen order-takers at an office equipment distributor were dismissed after internal investigations revealed they used company purchase orders to buy computers they had delivered to their own homes. The employees agreed to resign in lieu of having theft charges filed against them. Six months later, ten of the employees filed individual claims with the State Unemployment Commission that they had been forced to work unpaid overtime during their employment, using each other as witnesses. They stated their supervisor had forced them to punch out at the ends of their shifts, but required them to work several hours afterwards each day under threat of losing their jobs.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

This is a very common occurrence, and difficult for an employer to defense. Once an allegation of records fraud has been made and supported by witnesses (no matter how self-serving), it can be difficult for the employer to use employer-kept records to offset those allegations.


This is a case where viewSender offers both obvious and not-so-obvious benefits. On the obvious side, viewSender could easily validate whether the employees were actually working on a computer at the alleged times and dates, whether the work being done was on behalf of the employer, and whether nights worked late coincided with late arrivals on the same day. Because viewSender records are self-verifying and use multiply redundant internal validation techniques, they are nearly impervious to human alteration without detection.

Not so obviously, viewSender would have provided indisputable proof of the original theft transactions in addition to evidence as to whether work was or was not being performed that benefitted the employer , and if upon dismissal the fired employees had been made aware that these records were available, it may well have discouraged any fraudulent after-the-fact claims.



3. THE OFFICE RADAR O'REILLY

THE SITUATION

Margaret M. was an overweight and unattractive office assistant serving the sales staff of an Internet marketing firm. She didn't have much of a sense of humor, and didn't socialize much among the office staff. However, she was reliable and dependable, there were never any complaints about her getting her job done, and she rarely complained. While the quality of her work was appreciated, she was not the squeaking wheel that got the grease when pay raises were issued.

It wasn't until Margaret and three of her staff each gave two-week notices within a month of each other and left to go to a competitor that Margaret's true value became recognized. The office literally disintegrated - important though low-profile tasks like routing invoices had always been handled by Margaret, and descriptions of critical job functions hadn't been updated in years (if you needed to know how to do something, you would just ask Margaret). Even months after over-staffing with repalcements, the office did not run as efficiently as it had on fewer employees, and some customers used to the way things had been done during Margaret's tenure did not return.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

The primitive tools previously available focus primarily on discipline and loss prevention; none have the ability to recognize unique abilities, or individuals at the center of complex communications, and none can reconstruct the historical work habits of an employee.


viewSender tracks all of an employee's activities on the computer screen, and also reduces all screen content to its text equivalent. By reverse logic, this means that for every text file there is an associated screen image. Therefore, if you wanted to know who in an organization was performing a task associated with a set of keywords, you would need only to search viewSender's captured text archives for those keywords, and then request the user associated with the most matches. In the example cited above, you might search on "route invoices" and discover that Margaret had historically been doing those tasks. You could then pull up the images associated with those keywords, and work backwards and forwards through the associated images to create a filmstrip of all the steps Margaret used in various sessions when she routed invoices.viewSender could also tell you when Margaret and her clerks were becoming dissatisfied, getting other offers, or putting their resumes together, and why, based on keywords. You could then prevent their leaving by rewarding them more handsomely, or at worst, be better prepared for their departure with some respect for the work they had been doing.

One of the most exciting features of viewSender is an optional text analysis tool (available later) which can discern the flow of information across an organization. This tool scans incoming captured text for unique keywords and seeks similar patterns in previously scanned text. It can in this manner detect the spread of e-mails, files, information, negativity, and gossip across the organization. It can detect the significant relationships between individuals - that Margaret always had to prepare Bill's expense reports, for example, as well as screen his e-mail. It can see that



important procedural questions were originated elsewhere but were relayed at some point to Margaret. In other words, this optional feature can be set up to identify key individuals and roles in an organization (even if outside the job descriptions) and ensure those key players are being rewarded and otherwise cared for in the best interests of the organization.



4. THE ACCOUNTING CLERK/EBAY RETAIL MAGNATE

THE SITUATION

Robert was a mid-level accounting clerk in a trucking firm. He showed up to work every day, produced mediocre but passable work, and exhausted all his sick days, holidays, and vacation days without exception each year. Virtually every other employee in the department outperformed him... except on the Internet. Robert was an eBay-seller extraordinaire. He ran auctions, promoted his wares, managed his earnings, bid for re-saleable goods, arranged shipment, and coordinated UPS deliveries with his wife at home - all on company time. He kept a proxy website to mount his e-Bay offerings, price, and description pages and conversed with customers and vendors through his personal Hotmail account.

Worse, he bragged to other employees about his success and the ease with which he could intermingle his dealings with his paid work for the employer. Robert was eventually caught and dismissed, but not before the employer lost nearly a year of the production he was paying Robert for, and not before severe damage had been done to the corporate culture, where an attitude of entitlement had been created that employees were entitled to "their" Internet and whatever use they wanted to make of it.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

There are crude and primitive applications that, at a fairly high cost of network bandwidth and server storage space, can capture screenshots of screen activity, and there are a number of white/black list Internet blocking applications which can filter based on elements of website addresses. However, the former requires staffing to examines the thousands of screenshots generated daily at the average worksite, and the latter requires that the network administrator either know in advance to block Robert's proxy website address, or to limit all employees to a small subset of websites available on the Internet (to stop Robert's activities, this would have required blocking Hotmail, meaning most employees would have no access to their personal accounts when at work).


viewSender would, of course, have picked up Robert's activities very early through detection of keywords like "Auction", "Bidding", or "E-bay". It would have done so without unfairly restricting non-abusive employees, and would have picked up on e-mail communications between Robert and other like-minded employees.

Furthermore, viewSender would have provided incontrovertible evidence for any termination proceedings, gathered in a non-subjective manner and based on rules evenly applied to everyone.



5. ROMEO AND JULIET

THE SITUATION

XYZ Company provides web-hosting servers, custom websites and custom website applications to its corporate clients. XYZ's employees are young enthusiastic - many are right out of college, and for most this is their first job. As new projects come in, web designers and programmers are assigned from a pool in small teams to each project, returning to the pool as assignments are completed - those in the pool work on in-house or bench projects.

Company policy discourages office romances, but they have proven unavoidable. However, when you have a large and youthful crew, it is not practical to terminate employees based on the vagaries of interpersonal relationships when you've invested training and education to create long-term employer loyalty . Team dynamics have been affected and productivity has been undermined by linkups and breakups both inside and outside of teams. Some romantic liaisons have turned into very ugly working relationships in a short span of time.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Management usually becomes aware of unproductive personal relationships after a problem has arisen, and usually through the rumor mill or other unsanctioned message pipe. Once a relationship is already known to be problematic, management's options tend to be limited, and tend to result in the loss of at least one of a pair of individuals involved (usually the one least valuable to the immediate short-term goals of the company). The effects of workplace relationships usually begin affecting productivity long before management becomes aware of them, and often create ticklish situations for co-workers.


viewSender can generally detect negative and positive changes in relationships between employees based on keywords found in their computer-based communications. It can make managers aware of changes in relationships between employees without putting another employee in the position of having to tell management themselves. Managers can then mitigate damages before they occur, counsel those involved and alter team assignments to fit changing dynamics in employee chemistry.



6. HE'S HERE, SO HE MUST BE WORKING

THE SITUATION

Ralph has been with the company a long while, shows up every day on time, is congenial, and keeps his desk in the warehouse orderly. He's seen often moving quickly through the office carrying a sheaf of papers or a manila folder, and engaged in conversations with various other staff members. But when pressed, few people can tell you what Ralph actually does, and when you stop to think about it, you don't know what the benchmarks are to tell you if Ralph is doing a good job. When you finally get around to looking into it during a rare free afternoon, you discover that Ralph really doesn't do much of anything... except walk around between Solitaire sessions carrying paper and talking to people.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

We're currently in a down economic cycle, and generally during such times people like Ralph get weeded from the payroll. The problem is that is generally takes a special effort or push to economize from a bean-counter somewhere in the organization before they are found out.


viewSender can not only tell you when someone is doing something they shouldn't, it can also tell you when they are not doing something they should. You can set the viewSender Agent to report keywords when they are found on the computer screen, and you can also set up viewSender to notify you when one or more keywords that should be on the screen are not (such as the caption text of an application that is required to do a certain type of job). viewSender can also report absence of user activity on a computer, and of course activity on the machine that is not work-related.



7. LOOK HARDER WHEN THERE'S SOMETHING TO SEE

THE SITUATION

James has always been a stellar employee, but recently has been going through a divorce. His demeanor, attitudes, and relationships with co-workers have changed, and the effects are also showing in his treatment of customers. Unfortunately, everyone on your staff likes James, they understand his situation, and they will cut him some slack. More unfortunately, your customers will not.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Ultimately, and generally after the consequences have already begun to express themselves, if the situation deteriorates sufficiently, someone will come forward - sometimes this can be the stressed individual himself through mechanisms like the Employee Assistance Program. If caught in time, situations like James' can be turned around, though at some cost. Or not.


viewSender has a number of unique features specifically designed to adapt to changing situations. Two that specifically address changes in personnel behavior are adaptive monitoring and tonal comparison. Adaptive monitoring means that viewSender uses pre-set conditions to change the timing, resolution, quality, and completeness of monitoring settings. The conditions are established in advance by the system administrator across some or all monitored computers to ensure up- and down-scaling of the monitoring intensity, free of human intervention or subjectivity. When keyword matches occur in text found on a monitored computer's screen at a frequency that exceeds the value set by the administrator, the interval between captures may be lessened, or additional items may be captured (images, for example where previously only extracted text was sent to the server), or the quality (size, resolution, or precision of captured images may be improved, or there may be a combination of these changes. When the frequency of detected keyword matches decreases below the administrator's threshold, the monitoring parameters may be returned to their previous levels.

Tonal comparison is performed by the Server on text collected from Agents. Many words in the English language have a negative or positive connotation by themselves or in combination with others, though the shading may be slight. Over a large sample and time span, stable personalities tend to use a certain ratio of negative to positive words and phrases. The general tone (negative or positive) of the communications in an organization can be evaluated from collections of communications text for the organization as a whole, or for subgroups, or for individuals. The viewSender Server can process collected text for tonal comparison, and generate reports where there are changes in tone for an individual. [Note to Paul: This is a Server feature that has been designed but not yet written, and depends on research to establish the parameters for appropriate words/phrases and their tonal classifications.]



8. BACKUP AUDITING

THE SITUATION

ABC Medical Transcriptions is a consultancy that offers medical records transcribers (inpuyting information into digital records from hand-written and other sources - electronic medical records will be required of all medical service providers by federal law no later than 2014). ABC provides transcription services in their own facilities (where clients ship their hard documents or document images) as well as consultants and temporaries to work at client offices. ABC has a complete quality-assurance program in place, including electronic copies of both original source and digital output documents, peer and supervisory review, and a client acceptance procedure. However, these measures tend to be document-, client-, or patient-centric rather than oriented to the employees performing the work.

When an employee is doing dull, repetitive work, mistakes are inevitable. In the medical field, such errors have the potential to be very costly. Because of ABC's record retention policies, it is easy for ABC to can affirm whether or not an inputting error occurred by comparing source and output documents. This may answer an immediate legal question but not address prevention or mitigation of future problems. Unfortunately, the same quality assurance policies that improve accuracy by having documents reviewed by several employees makes it difficult to track which employee was responsible for a specific error, what procedures may have contributed to it, or variables which cause changes in error rates. It is not easy to see where efficiencies might be gained or which quality assurance policies produce better results.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

ABC utilizes the accepted protocols and procedures, and meets or exceeds all standards applicable to its roles and responsibilities.


viewSender is not a recorder, and so does not capture information on a document-by-document basis. It does, however, capture patterns of behavior specific to a computer user or work station, and can therefore report the series of activities occurring on one or more computers related to a time period or unique text (such as the UPC code or other ID related to a output document). When a problem is identified, the passage of an image or text containing a unique identifier can be tracked as it makes its way through an organization. Therefore, viewSender as a backup auditing and primary cause analysis tool for detecting the patterns, individuals and environments that contribute to an event (for correction, procedural analysis, or efficiency/efficacy research).

This can have unexpected benefits. Prior to deploying viewSender, ABC hired their transcriptionists as hourly employees, punching a time-clock and having assigned work-times and set break periods in shifts. ABC had a long-term contract with a major hospital chain, and noted that error rates for documents processed during certain time spans of the day were higher. When they looked at sequences of images captured by viewSender during the times in question, the problem became obvious. When the employee's assigned break time arrived, the employee would stop whatever he



or she was doing immediately, even when in the middle of processing a document. Upon returning from break, the employee would pick up from where they assumed they left off, and this was the point at which they were most likely to make errors. By changing their policies a little regarding document completion and making break times more flexible, ABC was able to reduce the overall error rate, creating a win-win outcome for everyone.



9. TRAINING AND TESTING

THE SITUATION

LMN Corporation trains and certifies operators for chemical plants, processing plants, automated manufacturing facilities, and power generation plants (including nuclear facilities). LMN also provides operators to industry on a contractual basis.

Clients generally send their students or certification applicants to LMN's facilities. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this. It allows LMN to closely control and restrict the testing and learning environment s to prevent distractions, cheating, and theft of its testing and instructional materials. By the same token, however, it deprives LMN of the ability to closely simulate the client's actual environment, which detracts from the quality of the experience for the client. LMN would like to be able to offer the option to provide their testing and instruction at the clients facilities, because it makes more sense logistically to send one or two instructors to a client site than to send twenty students to the LMN facilities and because the classroom environment would more closely match the client's real-world setting. However, LMN would not have exclusive control of the client's environment to prevent copying of their materials to a USB device, a network drive, or the Internet; to detect cheating by Google access or by some other means; or to play back student activities at some later point to analyze the effectiveness of the syllabus. The expense and labor required to re-create LMN's in-house security environment would be prohibitive to the client.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

There are a number of hardware and software options which can secure, record, or constrict and environment for testing or instruction. They tend to be non-portable, require skilled set-up, and/or have licensing restrictions preventing repeated installation and removal on dissimilar equipment. They also tend to be expensive and highly specialized for a given discipline.


The patent-pending architecture of the viewSender Agent can capture all of the activity on a computer regardless of the hardware of the specific computer on which it is run. Therefore, Agents can be easily and quickly be configured and installed on multiple machines without changes to hardware or software already installed on the target computers. The Agent Configuration Utility makes creation of bulk Agents painless. Agents are licensed to the Agent configuration utility rather than the computers on which they are installed, and a complete network can be set up in minutes. The Agents can report to a Server already existing at a central location (such as one at LMN's facilities) or a Server can easily be set up specific to a given set of Agents. Agents are very inexpensive, and are typically licensed in bulk for even greater economy.

The viewSender Agent does not block access, but will reliably report file copying to or from anywhere, Internet access, e-mail and messenger communications, and any other activity on the computer, and is therefore perfect for monitoring testing environments. Its capture and playback facilities are ideal for replaying a sequence of training steps to analyze a student's performance and



to teach. viewSender can ensure the integrity of the testing experience for the test-giver and test-taker.

Note: Separate and apart from the topics of testing and training, viewSender is the essential complementary software for chemical plants, processing plants, automated manufacturing facilities, power generation plants (including nuclear facilities) and other critical monitored environments (it can even monitor closeted monitoring computers with no human attendee). Where humans are tasked to monitor a plant or production environment, viewSender provides captured data necessary to evaluate operator performance, do post-mortem analyses on failures, and audit monitoring practices and personnel .

It can also be used as a secondary or backup monitoring system - popular plant-monitoring systems like Honeywell's HMI Web can produce text messages and notifications on screen, which can then be picked up by viewSender. viewSender can itself be set up to send notifications of its own so that when a text warning has been ignored by an operator, other staff can be notified.

[Paul: The next section is a true story from my work with ProSys - we probably will have to change the names to protect the guilty.] As an example, consider what happened a few years ago at the Conoco Westlake facility, the largest chemical processing plant in the United States and spanning Interstate 10 at the Mississippi river. Plant operators (the employees responsible for watching the software that monitors equipment for failure or hazardous situations) are notorious for detesting nagging or chattering alarms (alarms that when they occur tend to repeat themselves). Generally, they will ignore them (the shepherd crying "Wolf!" problem, sometimes also known as Three Mile Island). When audible alarms were added to the software and sophisticated logic was added to prevent turning the sound off, the operators simply clipped the wires to the external speaker attached to the wall (or in another room, they used a razor blade to remove the inner speaker cone and the drive magnet - the speaker was disabled, but the vandalism wasn't obvious on casual inspection). The problem? An unexpected alarm occurred when the operators were not paying attention to the screen, and sound was the only means the operator would have had to learn of the problem. The plant did not blow up, but shutting down and restarting the ethylene cracker cost several days and millions of dollars.



10. SENSITIVE INVESTIGATIONS

THE SITUATION

The CEO at a prestigious financial services firm learned though a business acquaintance that a senior executive and partner in the firm was suspected of ongoing ethical lapses. The possible impact on the firm if the accusation was true was only slightly greater than the impact if the accusation were false and the executive took offense and quit.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

There are no means available for a non-technical person to reliably and discretely monitor a personal computer in an automated fashion from another computer without seeking the help of another person, having extensive access to the monitored computer (enough to install software), or risking interception of the transmitted data.


viewSender Agent installations can quickly easily be placed on the monitored computer remotely or from any available USB port (the Agent is silently self-installing). viewSender Agents can be configured in advance of deployment from any computer (not just the computer to be monitored), and can be set up to report from the monitored computer to e-mail accounts or servers. The configuration utility is a straightforward guided tour through the configurable values, with understandable on-line help, hints, and tool-tips.

The Agent components on the monitored computer are well-hidden and encrypted, and all files and transmissions are also encrypted.

(Equally important, unauthorized installations of Agents are prevented by a number of security measures. All Agents report their identities to the Servers they talk to, which can link the identities to their creating Agent Configuration Utilities. The ACUs are embedded with their buyer's purchase information, which is also know to the viewSender's website databases.)



11. COURT-ORDERED, MANDATED OR ANTICIPATED COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS

THE SITUATION

As a result of successful litigation against a competitor, PQR Corporation received a judgment which in part enjoined the competitor from certain business practices towards PQR, their customers, and partners. In addition PQR's request to monitor the competitor's compliance was granted on the condition that the monitoring be restricted to subject matter of the litigation.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

There is no technology available which can monitor computer communications accurately and stay within the judge's criteria.


viewSender can easily be set up to capture information only upon the appearance of specific keywords on a computer screen, to capture differently based on which computer is being monitored, and to forward captured results to multiple sources (to PQR's viewSender Server, to the competitor's generic FTP server, and to the judge's e-mail address, for example).



12. DUE PROCESS/BEST PRACTICES

THE SITUATION

DEF Corporation has high turnover in its world-wide shipping department, and uses viewSender to prevent abuse of its computer systems, ensure productivity, and discourage or detect shrinkage cause by employees. The training necessary to correctly ship products to foreign countries using a variety of different shippers, forms, measurement systems, currencies, and even languages is expensive - much of the time, two employees (a trainer and a trainee) are required to do the work of one. DEF would like to develop a means whereby new employees could be self-training, given that the bulk of their applicants are not avid readers.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Professional tech writers, at significant expense, can generate videos, websites, and artificial examples. As world conditions and shipping technologies change, those videos and examples would need to be updated.


viewSender is excellent at recording the behaviors of someone who is especially good at his/her job, or capturing different performances of a task to choose the most productive or profitable method. Since DEF already uses viewSender, whenever management needs a training example all they need do is increase the monitoring frequency of the computers used by one or more of their most productive employees. The resulting images can be selected from the viewSender Viewer and compiled into a filmstrip report for each example required. If desired, a companion audio stream can also be recorded to coincide with the filmstrip images.



13. INAPPROPRIATE ASSOCIATIONS AND PATTERNS

THE SITUATION

RST Importers' business is driven by their populous marketing department, and consists of large numbers of relatively small quantity orders for expensive niche or specialty products. Lately, RST's profit margins have been dropping, and management is concerned about preferential treatment of certain vendors by some employees, high discounts given to customers unbilled hours for customization work, and inappropriate access to pricing schedules and customer lists granted to vendors, regulators, and competitors. There is some concern that some employees may be taking kickbacks, a common problem in the industry.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Managers generally react on a case-by-case basis as variances come to their attention.


Of course, viewSender can capture and transmit information in reaction to keywords detected on computer screens. One of the items usually returned when a keyword is discovered is the complete list of all text found on the screen at the time. viewSender can be set to return captured information on discovering keywords like "free", "discount", "pro bono", and "concession". Because viewSender can return all of the text found when a keyword is found, the viewSender Server tools can be used to then search in that returned text to see which customer's names come up too frequently.



14. BOTTLENECKS AND CHOKEPOINTS

THE SITUATION

OPQ Services is a large commercial and residential heating, air-conditioning, refrigeration, and appliance services company in a major city. By long tradition, OPQ Services' commercial invoices to its better customers require payment 30 days from final delivery or completion of services. The problem is that a typical major commercial air-conditioning repair involves a sequential chain of events: A technician is sent to diagnose the problem, parts are ordered and received, the parts are installed, any cosmetic repairs (wall cutouts for access) are made, and the repairs are tested. The problem has become that recently, bills to OPQ Services from their vendors and contractors are coming in sooner than invoices are going out.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Managers and supervisors familiar with specific jobs or clients may be aware of individual problems completing a given jobs, but general patterns of delay or obstruction that cross several jobs may be hard to pinpoint.


Search and analysis tools at the viewSender Server can explore captured screen text to help link job tickets across vendor invoices, shipping documents, e-mail communications, formal letters and other computer screen displays, and discover patterns, bottlenecks, and chokepoints. For example, these may be expressed as a consistently large number of e-mails related to shipping errors handled by a particular employee, or return shipping documents for incorrectly-ordered parts, or frequent requests from customers wondering why their service technician didn't show up.



15. DISASTER RECOVERY/IT SUPPORT

THE SITUATION

(Universal) Large companies with significant personal computer resources generally have(or contract) dedicated IT departments to deploy and maintain hardware and software. The most extensive consumers of IT labor are individual users experiencing hardware or software failures. While implementing solutions generally tends to be straightforward, diagnosis can be difficult. Users tend to feel culpable (and in some cases may be - this is especially true when viruses or worms contracted from the Internet or e-mail are found), and may exaggerate, not remember, or even conceal the steps they took or the events that occurred leading up to the failure.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Diagnosis depends on the technical and interviewing skills of the technician assigned to fix the problem.


When viewSender has been deployed on the network, the captured text and images can be used to determine the events that led to a computer failure. Since the captured information is stored on a server and not the monitored machine, the captured information is not lost when the monitored computer fails.

Depending on the Agent configuration, the captured information may even be used to reconstruct lost work or data.



16. OUTSOURCED SERVICES PROVIDER

THE SITUATION

GHI Consultants is a recruiting, consulting, contracting, and temporary services agencies for technical professionals. Their business depends on providing large clients in their area with quality temporary employees. Contractual technical professionals who do not want gaps in their employment move from one agency to another as they complete their previous tasks and agencies have assignments available.

The problem for GHI is that for contractors they've not worked with before, or who have done work for other agencies since their last work for a GHI client, there is no truly reliable way to verify not only the contractors work, but whether they and their work style are compatible with a given client. Past employers have become reluctant to provide more information other than whether the contractor worked there, their job title, and how long they worked. Even with good references, the subjective question of a contractor's working style is difficult to coordinate with the client's desires.

Usually, a client desires a contractor in part because their needs are immediate, and the contractors are actively seeking positions from several recruiters. So GHI is compelled to find the best possible candidate in the shortest possible time, with the knowledge that if they make a mistake it may damage their relationship with one of a relatively few number of large clients in their limited geographical area.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Agencies rely on pattern matching tools and the Internet to find qualified candidates. They rely on client and candidate interviews, references, and gut instincts to find a proper fit, and then hope everything works out.


GHI now requires contractors they place in client sites to run viewSender Agents on their work computers. Upon completion of an assignment, contractors are provided copies of the Agent's output which they are free to use as a sort of "portfolio" advertising their work habits. GHI keeps a copy as well, and when that contractor wants to be placed in another assignment for a GHI client, samples of the contractor's Agent captures are offered to the client when other match criteria indicate a possible good fit.



17. PRE-EMPTING PLAGIARISM

JKL Authoring is a service agency that supplies professional writing services to client companies, and provides in-house editing, documentation, ad copy, reports, resumes, press releases, and news item write-up services. JKL has recently been sued by one of their clients, accused of numerous instances of plagiarism, supported by Google searches on the Internet that return similar or identical text to that produced by one of JKL's most productive employees.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY

Google or Bing searches on unique word combinations are becoming a popular way to discover plagiarism. Unfortunately, not all written documents are available on the Internet - this is especially true of trade secrets, proprietary information, some types of technical writing, or text about subjects which are of low popular interest. And not all unique word combinations found in an original document that happen to also appear on the Internet are necessarily plagiarized. To do searches over the Internet on every unique phrase in every document a prolific writer produces would be cumbersome and labor-intensive at best, especially if others in the office are not familiar with the commonly used lexicon of a given industry or task.


Any work plagiarized using a monitored computer will appear multiple times in viewSender's database of collected images and text - several times, of course, as the output document is being generated, but also several more times as the user visits and reviews the source document(s). viewSender is perfectly suited for detecting plagiarism and prevent it from being delivered to clients. A finished document can be submitted to a custom viewSender server application which can identify unique characteristics of the text and seek out all similar occurrences in the monitored user's captured text and images, in a workgroup's captured data, or across an entire organization on or before a given date or time. The first time a unique phrase appears after the provided date (assuming the date precedes the start of the work on the output document) will be one of three things: the source of the plagiarized information, a reference which the author credits in his or her work, or the user's original work . Other occurrences of the unique text can also be requested (in the case where an author inadvertently copies something from memory and verifies it with the original source later).

The story of Jayson Blair, the plagiarizing journalist who once worked for the New York Times, is well known, and the application of viewSender technology to that kind of intellectual property theft is obvious.

However, there is a rapidly growing need for viewSender's plagiarism detection capabilities in an arena that may have much greater scale and risk. Most of the intellectual property created in the United States involves, in some form, computer programming. With the popularity of sites like CodeGuru.com, The Code Project, thousands of open-source projects, and hundreds of language-specific sample and help sites, the temptation (and financial justification) to copy another author's code into a proprietary project without strict attention to usage restrictions can be overwhelming (especially for young programmers wanting to be productive). There have recently been a number



of high-profile infringement cases filed by and against large corporations based on code plagiarism; the costs for all involved are tremendous, both in monetary and non-monetary terms, and experts expect these issues to continue increasing well into the foreseeable future.

viewSender can help validate the source of claimed original matter, ensure the proper accreditation of quoted material, and detect plagiarism before it puts a company at risk.


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