As the Internet has become more accessible and its use more versatile, and as the cost of having in-house employees has risen over the past few years more and more companies have seen the benefit of outsourcing some of their projects to individuals who work from home as freelance contractors. The result of this outsourcing work has been a reduction in the amount of money that many businesses have to spend on salaries for their employees. This type of outsourcing however brings with it its own challenges. For example if a company is paying their contractors hourly based on the amount of time that they spend working on to do the project, they need the ability to monitor their contractors and to assure that their contractors are actually working on their billable projects for the amount of time that they say they are. To assist in of this monitoring companies use productivity software random screen shot to help them review the work that their freelance contractors are doing.
These programs will actually capture a screenshot of their contractors computer screen, and will allow a project manager to see everything that is taking place on their contractors computer screen. These programs allow a project manager to in real time look over there contractor shoulder, yet since the majority of these programs use a web-based interface they are not obtrusive and in the majority of occasions the contractor has no idea when he is being monitored or when a screenshot of his computer it is being captured.
Some of the more advanced screenshot monitoring programs actually allow the person monitoring his employee or a contractor to use keywords in connection with when the screenshots are taken. The advantage of this is that a manager is able to monitor multiple computers at the same time, and not have to search through hours and hours of random screenshots in order to get the information that they need.