Features | Terminal Services Log

Posts Tagged ‘features’

Terminal Services Log can tell how efficient your employees are

The title of this post may sound too promising and too powerful, since employee efficiency tracking is a huge issue for all organizations. But for the companies whose employees are using Terminal Services to connect to their workspace, Terminal Services Log can be of great help. We’ll show you how.

Naturally, there is no such thing as unique measurement of employees’ efficiency and therefore Terminal Service Log can not produce the magical number that would represent the overall rating for each and every employee. Instead, it delivers series of reports you can use as high-quality input for your management team when evaluating team members.

All reports related to the efficiency tracking are placed i dedicated reports group named “User Reports”:

User reports are available on the left menu

If you already have Terminal Services Log installed (download the trial and install if you don’t), you can browse the available reports in this group and find all sorts of information about the activity of your employees.

I would like to highlight two reports among them which we found the most useful for this purpose.

Daily Activity (Gantt) – activity breakdown per user

Gantt chart shows user activities during one day

This reports shows Active, Idle and Disconnected intervals of each user during the day (Remote Control Time is also available, but irrelevant for efficiency tracking). According to the standards of your organizations and the nature of each job position, you require certain amount of Active state for specific user – working hours (for example 9am – 5pm) can be defined as well. You can easily check Active time in this report:

User Activity by State – total activity per user(s)

Ideal for a monthly, weekly or any custom date range report, User Activity by State shows how much users have been Active , Idle or Disconnected during the selected period of time. Companies tend to use it mostly as part of monthly evaluation when calculating payments and actual working hours.

User Activity by State Reports - Shows user activities summarized by different states (Active, Idle, Disconnected)

Hope this helped – let us know if you would like to have additional reports and we will do our best!

February 24th, 2011 | Tags: employee-tracking, features, reports
Posted in features | By: bob | No Comments »

Version 3.0 brings Dynamic Excel Reporting

The importance of reports in our Terminal Services Log software can hardly be questioned. I mean, the whole application and usage scenarios we’ve heard about are all about reporting and monitoring. Two most important report categories are:

Alerting & Monitoring – for example: If the system detects intrusions on your system, you will receive an email and be able to react straight away to solve the problem.
Data Reporting – most usage scenarios fit into this category. It is with all cases when your primary goal is to collect and analyze data. The couple of examples monitor server usage, application usage, licenses, employee time tracking…

Naturally, you can analyze the data both in the Terminal Services Log itself, or export it and analyze it using third party applications, mostly Microsoft Office Excel. In this post we will focus on Data Reporting - how to analyze data using third party applications.

What we had before – static datasheet reports

If you wanted to collect and analyze data with earlier Terminal Services Log versions (2.x), you had an option to export every report to CSV or PDF. Obviously, PDFs could serve as the “read and show-only” reports while CSV (Comma Separated Values) files could be opened by Excel or any other software and analyzed your way, put into your calculations, connect with other documents etc.

Once made, those analysis were static, so each time you wanted to “refresh” your custom built reports in Excel, you had to export the data again to CSV file and repeat the complete procedure of building custom Excel (or other) reports. We have received many feature suggestions that claimed dynamic reporting should be implemented within the product, so the data in reports is updated automatically.

Dynamic Worksheets are now available!

To make the reports dynamic in version 3.0 and fulfill customers’ expectations, we have implemented the de facto standard for dynamics reporting – Microsoft Office Excel Dynamic worksheets and Dynamic PivotTables.

Let’s take a look of how it’s done. Choose any report in Terminal Services Log and click on the Excel export button in the main menu. The following window will appear:

Obviously, exporting to both Static and Dynamic Worksheet will look the same in Excel at first glance. The difference lies in the Excel Data menu:

By clicking the Refresh button, when the file is exported as Dynamic Worksheet or Dynamic PivotTable all of your data will be automatically updated with the most current results from the Terminal Services Log. You can also explore the Connection settings which enable you to use dynamic data in Excel as well as in your custom built applications (or third party applications).

Dynamic PivotTables make reports even more flexible

In the Excel export described above, there is also an option export report to Excel Dynamic PivotTable. Dynamic Worksheets enable automatic data updating and PivotTable takes you a step further. The main purpose of PivotTables in general is summarizing and analyzing data in easily readable format. Is there a more obvious need than summarizing tons of data you have about your server into more logical and understandable structure?

Here is the example of Application Usage History Report. It contains a huge amount of data. But if you export it as a Dynamics Pivot Table, just by dragging 2 items into Pivot Table field list, you will get a simple and comprehensive report showing how many minutes each application has been used for:

Click here to download trial version of Terminal Services Log 3.0.

January 13th, 2011 | Tags: dynamic reports, excel, features
Posted in features, new-features | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Monitor ‘Per Device’ licenses on your Terminal Server / Citrix

With the Terminal Services Log v.2.5 we released a new feature that allows you to monitor application licenses per device. One of the most popular applications being licensed per device for Terminal Services is Microsoft Office. (Learn more about Office licensing on TS). So let’s see how to configure this:

The first thing you need to do is to configure a new license type.

Go to File > Preferences
Switch to Licenses tab
In the Application Name column select the application you want to monitor (e.g. Microsoft Office Word)
In the License Type column choose Device License
Enter the Number of licenses you have

Add other Microsoft Office Applications if you want to monitor these. Let’s say I have 5 Office Standard licenses. Standard includes Word, Excel and Outlook but it does not include Access, so I have added 5 licenses for Word, Excel and Outlook and 0 licenses for Access.

How does license compliance work for per device licenses? Our application will calculate the number of unique devices that were used to run these applications in a given time period and selected server.

Finally, let’s check if I am license compliant with Microsoft Office.

Okey, looks good… my users are only using applications we have licensed. (They cannot even use Access since it is not installed.)

Let’s consider another situation. Let’s say I purchased Office Professional licenses, and I do have 5 Access licenses at hand. The report would then look like this:

So as you can see, my users are not using Access, and we are over licensed for Access. Next time I might want to reconsider the optimal Microsoft Office suite for my needs.

Conclusion

Our license compliance reports help you to determine the ideal number of licenses you need to purchase for your users on a Terminal Services / Citrix server. If you are over licensed, we help you save money when renewing licenses for business applications, and when you are under licensed… well we are also saving money for you, as you might need to purchase some licenses to resolve the problem before you are fined.

Our application allows you to monitor Per User / Per Devices licenses and we will be adding more types in the future versions of our application. For more details about licensing of your business application you should check with your vendor.

November 9th, 2009 | Tags: features, how to
Posted in scenarios | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

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