Spark/Wildfire to track working time

Spark Spark Support
1

We need to use Spark in our organization to track how many hours users are actively at work. Or doing something non-idle at their computers.

Our users are Windows,Linux and OSX

I know these are stupid fantasy questions, but maybe someone had to deal with similar problem;

  • Is there a way to forbid users from changing “Away” time to infinity/large number so they won’'t cheat the system?

  • Is there a way to somehow force users to always run Spark? (Windows Users have Administrator accounts on their PCs.)

  • What is the easy way to extract how many hours user was online with status “Available” ? So we can import data in excel or whatever and see how many hours people were “Working”.

2

Hi,

I may LOL @ “We need to use Spark in our organization to track how many hours users are actively at work.” Spark is not designed to do this.

Q1: No

Q2: No

Q3: Enable auditing and trace the presence packets.

Is one “working” if one is moving the mouse around or pressing the Ctrl key all day long? I’'d like to start “working” for this company

LG

3

As it turns out we have been entertaining the use of spark for just such a purpose.

We are considering developing a spark plug which would interact with our salesforce.com db. Each active client from SF.com would be available in the status list, and a consultant could simply select the status message corresponding to the project they were working on. When the consultant starts working on a different project he can simply change his status accordingly, and spark would then send the update to sf.com. All of the reports could be run out of sf.com.

Of course this would all be abstracted out into a clean interface, so you could track time against Jira issues, an excel sheet, or whatever.

This assumes that your user community wants to track their time, and does not want to cheat the system. It could also cause problems if a user forgets to change their status when switching between projects, since this could lead to erroneous work reports and billing problems. But it is a compelling idea I think.

4

This is a very interesing idea. We have to fill out timesheets everyweek. It would be cool for spark to automatically store this info, maybe in a database table so we could write extraction routines to our timesheet system.