Logging employee entry and exit details via a website?
Dear Gurus,
My client owns a company which has about 3000 employees. All employees work off satellite offices. Every satellite office has one employee. My client needs to keep tab of when every employee comes in to office and leaves. The connectivity from satellite office varies from 128 kbps to higher.
My Solution: I am thinking of creating a Active Directory domain (windows server 2003), create IDs for every employee, host a website with IIS, and extract login and logout details per user. The server would be a Intel dual-core with 6 GB RAM and about 500 GB to start with.
Is it even possible to extract first login and last logout details this way? What happens when a employees logs out during lunch or gets disconnected from the site? Will IIS rewrite the log a relogin as first login? how do we tackle this? Client would like to be able to extract a report of first login and last logout by himself... do we have an script or a third-party app which could do this? Also, I would appreciate if you could tell me what should be the websites internet pipe? For 3000 users logging in, would a 2 MBPS link suffice? The website is only used for logins and serves no other purpose.
Do we have any other alternate solution? I also thought about RADIUS but it does not fit into this requirement. Or could a ISP provide us logins, host a website and provide login/logout details? Any other viable solution?
Please advice.
My client owns a company which has about 3000 employees. All employees work off satellite offices. Every satellite office has one employee. My client needs to keep tab of when every employee comes in to office and leaves. The connectivity from satellite office varies from 128 kbps to higher.
My Solution: I am thinking of creating a Active Directory domain (windows server 2003), create IDs for every employee, host a website with IIS, and extract login and logout details per user. The server would be a Intel dual-core with 6 GB RAM and about 500 GB to start with.
Is it even possible to extract first login and last logout details this way? What happens when a employees logs out during lunch or gets disconnected from the site? Will IIS rewrite the log a relogin as first login? how do we tackle this? Client would like to be able to extract a report of first login and last logout by himself... do we have an script or a third-party app which could do this? Also, I would appreciate if you could tell me what should be the websites internet pipe? For 3000 users logging in, would a 2 MBPS link suffice? The website is only used for logins and serves no other purpose.
Do we have any other alternate solution? I also thought about RADIUS but it does not fit into this requirement. Or could a ISP provide us logins, host a website and provide login/logout details? Any other viable solution?
Please advice.
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ASKER
Ted, I should tell you that I'm shocked to hear my "bright idea" will not work. Relived that I did not implement the solution.... glad I approached to you guys.
RADIUS might work if it collects audit logs for login/logout activity. I'm don't know if you can get to the data for it.
Otherwise, a simple timesheet billing application might work. Some can be installed at the Administrator level so that the regular users (who aren't Administrators) can't uninstall it but it will log their hours regularly as soon as they sign in. Lawyers and Engineers use software like that to track their hours. Any hours not billable to a client is overhead, but it does track their time. It's been 16 years since I worked in Engineering so any software I could recommend for that purpose would have changed by now.
Otherwise, a simple timesheet billing application might work. Some can be installed at the Administrator level so that the regular users (who aren't Administrators) can't uninstall it but it will log their hours regularly as soon as they sign in. Lawyers and Engineers use software like that to track their hours. Any hours not billable to a client is overhead, but it does track their time. It's been 16 years since I worked in Engineering so any software I could recommend for that purpose would have changed by now.
ASKER
Ted, my initial plan was to create a Active Directory domain and use IIS to log first log in and last log out. I'm looking at all kinds of third-party solutions and none seems to be 'fitting the bill'
Is each client computer Windows?
ASKER
Yes. All client computers are on Windows 2000/XP.
All logon/logoff activity can be configured to appear in the 'Security' section of the 'Event Viewer' in Windows. I've seen articles online for converting those events into entries in SQL databases.
ASKER
Do we have any alternate third-party solution?
No recent ones. It's been 16 years since I worked in Engineering when I used any automated billing applications.
ASKER
Since we have not reached any solution, I'm going to pull my question off this if I do not hear from anybody in the next 24 hours.
If you read the support and FAQ's for EE awarding points isn't always about receiving a solution. Sometimes the answer is 'No' or you have to do follow up yourself.
I answered your original question which was 'No' a website cannot be used to achieve your goals.
I answered your original question which was 'No' a website cannot be used to achieve your goals.
ASKER
I agree. I'm in touch with Quest and they're providing me a web-based solution... i managed to get hold of 3-4 thirdparty vendors who do these services. Quest charges $15 a month for this service and are working up the pricing for a 3000 user environment. I'll post more details when I get more details.
ASKER
Quest has agreed to provide me their software TimeForce. The software lease would be for one year and they would also host the website and do system maintanence (server and report backups). We are still finilizing the pricing but they vary as they charge depending on number of licenses.
Once again. I answered your original question correctly and recommended you find a 3rd party solution which you did. I deserve the points.
ASKER
I agree and I truly appreciate you being on this question all along. But in my question, I did ask for a third-party solution and at the end, I got one myself. Since we both did our work, would you mind if I split the points between us?
Well technically you asked two questions in one. The second part should have been in another question. I feel I deserve the points.
ASKER