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).

THE VIEWSENDER SOLUTION
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.