Rebecca in Harrisburg, PA asks:
My office has a strict No Social Media policy, but our employees still frequent Facebook and Twitter and it’s affecting our productivity as a company. What steps can we take to prevent this from happening?
First and foremost, make sure your employees know about that policy. It should be in writing and clearly outline what is permitted and what is not acceptable when it comes to internet usage in general.
There are 3 ways to block users from a particular site or specific types of sites:
1. Through the firewall: log into the firewall, go to security services, content filtering and then click on configure. from there you can customize a list of forbidden domains. Once this is done you will enable it on the firewall to block it for network LAN users.
2 Software: Some types of software will block websites if you instruct it to. There are programs that come with web filtering option that can include blocking access, giving warnings, monitoring or allowing access. In some cases you can choose from categories of web sites to block or create custom categories.
3. Hosts File: This can be edited to block websites. When you access a website, your computer contacts your domain name system (DNS) server and requests its numerical IP address. Your hosts file is a file, local to your computer, that can override this behavior. When you surf to a site, Windows automatically checks to see if the address is located in the Hosts file. You can open the Hosts file in Notepad and edit the entries so the sites you want to avoid are blocked. A PC can be configured in a way that it can only see specific addresses.
A word of warning. Despite your best efforts, your employees may still find a way to access these sites. There are ways around these measures and where there is a will, there is a way, but it’s worth a try!
If you would like a consultation on how to implement policies and procedures to enhance productivity in your office, call Teltek IT! We are happy to advise you on the best practices for instituting procedures and ensuring compliance utilizing hardware and software solutions.
Teltek is proud to offer IT services as the fourth component to our multi-systems approach as your single source technology services company. This Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering completes our longstanding goal to provide our clients with a one-call resource for all of their business technology needs. IT outsourcing, remote back up and disaster recovery, helpdesk support, computer network relocations, security products and server/desktop virtualization are just a few of the services available.