Spybuddy
Reviewer's Comments
SpyBuddy,
from ExploreAnywhere Software, is a good product. The user
design from the main menu is excellent. The designer used
colorful icons of each of the applications that are monitored
like yahoo, AOL, and MSN. Because the menu system was so
impressive, the rest of the screens lacked in a consistent
flow, especially the configuration screens. It appeared
as if the application were designed by two different groups
of designers.
Feature Set: 
The keystroke recorder in SpyAgent allows you to see everything
that is typed, including your chat conversations, Instant
Messaging, and emails (both incoming and outgoing on POP3
and SMTP). With the keystroke recorder, you can read the
text typed into an email or a document, but it also includes
showing things such as a tab function or an enter key. Sometimes
it gets a little confusing reading the logs because of all
of the special controls imbedded within the text logs. Good
or bad, the keystroke recorder also allows you to see logins
and passwords that have been used since the monitoring began.
SpyAgent can send you updated activity reports to a specified
email address or FTP them to a particular location. You
get to choose how often you want the reports sent to you
and what is included in the activity reports. If you don't
get your emails, you may need to change your outgoing SMTP
setting in SpyAgent to send the emails through your own
ISP.
Ease of Use: 
SpyAgent is extremely easy to use. As an added bonus, SpyAgent
is one of the few spyware monitoring products that includes
filtering options as part of the package. The filtering
is for doing basic filtering of specific keywords and websites,
or blocking of applications and ports related to chat and
Instant Messaging. This filter is not a full-blown filtering
system that you would expect to find in a dedicated Internet
Filter. SpyAgent also has a really nice events viewer, that
lists all events on a computer as they are performed.
Ease of Installation / Setup:
This product is easy to install.
Monitoring Effectiveness: 
It has a very good stealth mode feature. If you don't want
anyone to know the application is running in the background,
the stealth mode allows you to completely hide the application.
You can't even see the application running when you display
the Windows Task Manager, by way of the CTRL-ALT-DELETE
combination. It is easy to re-display the application with
certain hotkey keystrokes that you can customize for easy
remembering. One related feature is the ability to disable
any spyware detectors. It also has a lock-down feature that
prevents any activity from occurring on the computer during
certain times of the days.
Help/Documentation:
The Help is excellent. It contains context sensitive Help
on most pages and also has online access to additional Help
and frequently asked questions.
Summary:
SpyAgent is an excellent product that doesn't slow down
your computer. NOTE: SpyTech, the manufacturer or SpyAgent,
also offers another application called SpyAnywhere. This
application allows you to remotely control any PC that has
the SpyAnywhere application loaded. Combined with SpyAgent,
the two products make a powerful monitoring and surveillance
tool.
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