Spector CNE: Change Data Grouping for New Revelations

Modifying your top-down view can offer new revelations about an employee’s computer behavior. The Spector CNE Viewer shows a user’s activities under Online Searches, Web Sites Visited, Files Transferred, Keystrokes Typed, Program Activity, User Activity, Document Tracking and Keywords Detected in a “hierarchical” tree arrangement. The hierarchy of this tree is set by a default “data grouping.” When you’re viewing large amounts of data, if you want to understand quickly what’s going on, or if you need a specific report, you may want to change the data grouping.

1. Select the Group by > Arrange Custom Grouping from the Viewer toolbar.
2. In the left column of the Arrange Custom Grouping window, you immediately see the “groups” not used in the current hierarchy. Move groups you want to see (Show) from the left column to right. Move groups that you don’t need to see (Hide) from right to left. Use the Move Up/Move Down buttons to set the hierarchy of Currently Displayed groups.

Suppose you’re monitoring web site activity. Web Sites Visited records are initially arranged by Date > Domain > Subdomain.  You can see at first glance the domains the user has visited on any day, but the domain and subdomain names may mean nothing to you. By adding Title directly under Domain and removing the other groups, you’ll immediately see web page names and have a better idea of the purpose of the visit.

When you change the grouping, you also change the Summary and Details displayed in the lower pane. This creates new possibilities for printing and exporting reports.  For example, in the above custom grouping, selecting CNN.com would give you a Summary view of visits the user made to just CNN on ALL dates (currently loaded into the Viewer). You could export the Summary data for inclusion in a report on each user’s visits to CNN.