The MacBook Pro M1 hits lowest sale price ever in epic deal at Amazon
The MacBook Pro M1 is on sale and down to its lowest price ever in a fantastic deal that we've spotted at Amazon.
Read More
Blog
- Home /
- Blog
InterGuard employee monitoring software
InterGuard is employee monitoring software that you can use to track the activities of your team members. This stealth monitoring application running on employees’ computers, tablets, and phones relays information back to the server, detailing everything from sent emails to visited web pages.
In our InterGuard evaluation, we investigate whether this tool can help a business increase productivity, secure sensitive data, and prove compliance with data privacy laws.
- Our guide to the best employee monitoring software
Plans and pricing
InterGuard has a relatively complex pricing structure. First, you have the choice between a cloud-hosted service and an on-premise installation. You’ll need an SQL server and to contact InterGuard for full pricing details if you’d like to install the software on your premises.
InterGuard’s main cloud-hosted plan is paid annually and has a minimum of two users. If you buy between two and 10 licenses, PC/Mac monitoring costs $156/license/year, Chromebook monitoring costs $60/license/year, and Android/iOS monitoring costs $150/license/year. If you buy between 11 and 25 licenses of each different type of monitoring, there’s a discount of between 10-50%. You must contact the sales team for a quote if you plan on buying more than 25 licenses. You can also choose to pay two years in advance for a 15% discount.
Several upgrades cost extra. Geolocation support is $19/year and web blocking costs $15/year. An Enterprise package for PC ($15.60/year) adds file tracking, print monitoring, and download tracking. Endpoint Lockdown ($60/year) helps you monitor and control a laptop if it’s been lost or stolen. Data Loss Prevention ($133/year) blocks sensitive data sent by email, filled into web forms, or saved to removable media. Do note that these are all separate add-ons for Mac and PC, so if you want them to work on both Macs and PCs, you must buy them both.
There’s a monthly payment plan option, but it feels like an afterthought. If you pay monthly, you can only monitor Windows and Mac computers, so if you need Chromebook, Android, iPhone, or iPad monitoring, you’ll need an annual plan instead. You also can’t buy the various add-ons, like geolocation and web blocking, if you choose the monthly payment plan, and the price per user is more than double the price of the annual plan.
How it works
InterGuard has an online test drive and a 14-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card. During the free trial, the monitoring software will not work in Stealth mode, so users will be aware that it is running.
It’s possible to deploy the monitoring software remotely on computers using InterGuard’s NetDeploy tool, but the easiest way to install the software is by being at the physical location of the endpoint that you want to monitor and downloading the installer from the InterGuard Dashboard. Before installation, you’ll need to add an exclusion for the software to your antivirus program.
Features and services
Once the monitoring program is installed, you’ll typically use the InterGuard web interface to organize employees into groups, decide what you want to record, create alert word categories, and set up automated reports.
The InterGuard dashboard has six customizable views of your employees’ productivity data. The Chart view is a high-level overview with over 60 chart types that help you spot trends or issues. The User view shows you the team’s workday and who is being the most productive. You can view screenshots of each user’s screen. The Data view is a filterable log of all recorded data, and the Search view allows you to find any activity, perhaps in the case of an investigation.
You can create alerts based on rules that you create, and assign them different levels of risk. For example, you could consider the use of a peer-to-peer file-sharing program a high risk and opt to receive an alert in the Alert Log if any employee starts one up. Using the Reports and Notifications wizard, you can get your choice of reports emailed to you daily or weekly.
Support and customer care
InterGuard has a small knowledge base with around 30 articles. Most of these are guides on how to get anti-virus software programs to ignore the stealth monitoring application. But all the articles are long, detailed, and accompanied by clear screenshots and useful videos.
Customer support is available via email Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST. The 24/7 live chat support can be accessed within the application. InterGuard specifies that live chat support is only able to help with the most basic account issues. We sent a few emails to InterGuard technical support and received helpful replies within four hours, which is reasonably quick.
The competition
InterGuard may be a pioneer of employee behavior monitoring, but we find Teramind easier to use due to its more modern interface. Teramind also has better templates for automation out of the box; we found that InterGuard’s Alert Word system was prone to flagging false positives when employees visited innocuous websites.
ActivTrak is another top tool for employee monitoring with a stealth agent that runs in the background. At $7.20/user/month, it’s about half the price of InterGuard yet includes all the same salient features for monitoring employees on PCs, Macs, and Chromebooks.
Final verdict
InterGuard is a powerful employee monitoring tool that’s extremely customizable. It has strong keyword tracking and can generate a wealth of reports on your employees’ activities. That said, its interface is somewhat clunky, and its stealth employee monitoring agent takes time to set up, particularly if you run antivirus software.
We recommend InterGuard if you’re interested in monitoring a range of different types of devices. While most employee monitoring software focuses on Windows and Mac, InterGuard has monitoring agents for Android and iOS too, potentially making it a more comprehensive solution for your needs.
- Our guide to the best employee monitoring software
Date
10 Nov 2020Sources
Other Blog
-
-
Apple Silicon is now more important than Apple design
Read MoreYou can forgive Apple for getting so focused on its Apple Silicon update that it really believed we'd all get that "Peek Performance" was about looking at the incredible M1 Ultra performance promises and the hardware they've built around it.
That's it. The head fake of the Greg Joswiak Tweet notwithstanding, this event on Tuesday, March 8, was a signal that Apple was narrowing its focus even further. Where once it was obsessed with hardware design and the various ways you can bend and flex steel, glass, and aluminum, it's now focused on the silicon you can't see but will surely feel the impact of all the systems Apple builds around it.
The silicon road ahead
The company has never been shy about its Apple Silicon plans, promising us two years ago that it would eventually migrate all its Intel-based Macs to its own SoCs. Today it has nearly made good on that promise, with all but one system (the Mac Pro, which will likely get there this year) now running an Apple M-class chip.
The 5-nanometer M1 Ultra's specs, 114 billion transistors, 128GB of unified memory, 8000 GB/s memory bandwidth are all exciting and for pros and creatives a mouth-watering proposition.
Still, Apple’s new Mac Studio design, which is milled from a singular block of aluminum, is almost perfunctory. The story is not how this little box looks – it's what it can do.
Same with the updated Studio Display which doesn't appear much different from previous designs, but is now running essentially a tiny iPhone or iPad on the inside (it even has Center Stage for FaceTime).
Apple's other major announcements were for a frozen design iPhone SE and a fixed design iPad Air.
The iPhone gets Apple's bespoke A15 Bionic mobile CPU (not officially Apple Silicon) and the iPad Air gets the M1.
That's the excitement. That's the moment. That's the answer to the question: How many places can Apple put its own homegrown or custom-built silicon?
(Image credit: Apple) Performance matters
For Apple, the answer to that question is enough to excite. Design flourishes are, essentially, just that: flourishes that no longer mean much.
If Apple thinks that the iPhone SE is enough because the phone now has a much more powerful processor and 5G, then it's willing to cede a little bit of its design leadership to others (not that anyone has really picked up that baton).
The Mac Studio is not a showpiece. It's an insanely powerful system that will use its specialized air channeling system to keep it quiet during heavy workloads, letting the 3.5-inch x 7.7-inch box fade into the background.
(Image credit: Apple) The 27-inch Studio Display is flashier, but only because of the gorgeous screen and whatever you'll run on it.
We did get a brand-new Mac, which is an exciting development, especially if you were itching for another option and wondered if the mini could be embiggened (size-wise and in performance) to take on truly herculean tasks. But we didn't get a new category, which would've called for a completely new design, even design language, to consider. We got more variations on the known and a lot more Apple Silicon.
What Apple is fast becoming is a company that produces fast systems and thrilling, expansive services. The designs that used to elicit stares and barely-hidden obsession are no longer special.
Apple will still thrill with the M1 Ultra and Mac Studio. It will succeed in the marketplace when people rush to snap up these new systems, but this is a different Apple than the one I've known for 20-plus years. I guess I should get used to it.
-
Mac Mini 2022 - news, rumors, and everything we know
Read MoreA revamped Apple Mac Mini for 2022 is hotly anticipated, so like you, TechRadar's editors were surprised it didn't appear at Apple's Peek Performance event on March 8.
We did see something else for fans of the Apple desktop line: the Mac Studio, featuring the new M1 Ultra SoC (system-on-a-chip), designed with creative professionals in mind. But something is clearly brewing: Convincing new rumors say Apple is testing nine new Mac models ahead of WWDC with brand-spanking new M2 silicon chips -- and that includes a new Mac Mini.
It's been almost two years since Apple released the Mac Mini (M1), powered by the Apple M1 chip alongside the Apple MacBook Air (2020) and 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro (2020). So a new model – possibly powered by the same M2 chip that could also appear in the rumored MacBook Air (2022) – is definitely due.
The mini-PC impressed us when we reviewed it in 2020, and the M1 chip powering it showed itself to be a pretty competent performer overall. Still, a home PC is a pretty big piece of kit. Can a revamped 2022 Mac Mini win over converts beyond the device's fanbase? Here's everything we know so far.
Apple Mac Mini (2022): cut to the chase
- What is it? Apple's next-generation mini-PC
- When is it out? Expected late 2022 or 2023
- What will it cost? Unknown, but likely similar to current pricing (starting at $699 / £699 / AU$1,099)
Latest News
April 15: Apple is testing a whole bunch of new Macs that are powered by its next-gen M2 chip -- including a new Mac Mini.
April 14: A firmware update for Apple’s new Studio Display references a product marked as Macmini10,1, which apparently is a model ID not used for any of the existing Mac product lines.
March 13: Bo-ring! Well-respected and (usually very well-informed) Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the upcoming Mac Mini will keep the existing form factor - and will show up in 2023. :-(
March 09: At its Spring "Peek Performance" event, Apple unveiled a new M1 Ultra chipset, the iPad Air 2022, the iPhone SE 2022, the fancy Mac Studio, and more! But no Mac Mini, unfortunately.
More of the latest Mac Mini tidbits ▼
Feb. 21: Seven new Mac models will be released in 2022, says Mark Gurman, all featuring some version of the Apple silicon processors. Including a new Mac Mini.
March 04: With an Apple event right around the corner, there's a lot of attention being paid to rumors of new MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones. But a new M2-powered Mac Mini could be the star in the show, writes TechRadar's John Loeffler.
Aug. 23, 2021: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that the M1X Mac mini could launch “in the next few months.” Could that mean Apple will have a massive announcement event planned for September?
Release date and price
(Image credit: Future) The Apple Mac Mini (2022) hasn't even been announced yet, so there's no official release date that we can confirm. The last Mac Mini (M1) was released in late 2020, so going off Apple's typical 18 to 24 product release cadence, we expected it to be announced at the March 2022 event, but sadly this wasn't the case. It's still likely we could see it announced before the end of the year though if Apple does have plans to release an M2 SoC.
The 2020 models of both products were announced at the same time, and both feature the M1 chip. There are also a lot of rumors that the 13-inch MacBook Pro won't see a major redesign, which might be reserved for a new MacBook Air reveal later this year.
If that is true, then it may make sense for the Mac Mini with M2 to be announced alongside the 13-inch MacBook Pro since there's much less excitement around a Mac Mini redesign than there is for a MacBook.
After all, announcing two new M2-powered devices that don't feature major redesigns is better than announcing just the one, and if the Mini were to only get internal improvements, swapping out the M1 for the M2 would make mass production significantly simpler.
More recent rumors from well-placed sources suggest that Apple might have decided to push back the Mac Mini 2022 to 2023 – and if that turns out to be the case, we're going to have to stop referring to it as the Mac Mini 2022.
Design
(Image credit: Future) One of the major advantages to the Mac Mini is its size, which is perfect for those who need a home PC but don't want a large PC case or an all-in-one computer like the latest iMac. But will that change?
There has been a lot of talk about the potential redesign of Apple's MacBook Air (2022) as well as the lack of redesign for the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Which side of things do we expect the Mac Mini to come down on?
It's a hard question to answer, unfortunately: since there is less interest in seeing a Mac Mini redesign, there's less incentive for Apple to redesign the Mac Mini. However, one of the reasons why the lack of a redesign for the 13-inch MacBook Pro makes a lot of sense is that the 13-inch MacBook Pro might be discontinued after this year in favor of the 14-inch MacBook Pro (2021).
If you're going to continue to release a product, and we don't expect the Mac Mini to be discontinued any time soon, then it's almost certain that it will have to get a redesign (albeit, nothing major) to fit in with other Mac products that do, namely the iMac, and presumably the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch.
The rumor mill has gone both ways on this, but earlier leaks hinting that a change in form factor was on the cards have since been shot down by other sources. We'll have to wait and see what the Mac Mini 2022 looks like.
Specs and performance
There's not much we can say specifically about the Mac Mini's specs without knowing the Apple chip that runs it, but we do expect that it will have the same 8GB/16GB Unified Memory configuration options, with anywhere from a 256GB SSD up to a 2TB SSD.
We also expect the number and types of ports to stay more or less the same, but we're hoping for an upgrade to USB-C Thunderbolt 4 from the existing Thunderbolt 3. Same goes for upgrades in the way of HDMI 2.1 and a DisplayPort 1.4 output, but with Thunderbolt 4, those ports might not be necessary anyway, so they might get the axe with a new Mac Mini.
That might shift around our list of best monitors for the Mac Mini, but something tells us this isn't much of a concern for Apple.
As for the chips powering the new device, that's where things can get interesting.
There is some buzz that we won't just see an M2-powered Mac Mini, but we might also see an M1 Pro and even an outside chance of an M1 Max-powered Mac Mini.
These latter two might be more for professionals rather than home PCs, but the possibility could give the Mac Mini much broader appeal, especially since it might allow consumers of all stripes to access the performance of an M1 Pro and M1 Max at a more accessible price point than you'd get with a MacBook Pro.
- Shop the latest MacBook Pro deals and sales
-
Nvidia mining GPUs bring in three times more revenue than expected
Nvidia mining GPUs brought in three times the revenue from industrial mining operations than Nvidia had anticipated, but will this help alleviate the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 shortages?
Read More
Find Out More About Us
Want to hire best people for your project? Look no further you came to the right place!