Security Matters
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I would Love to hear whether you are allowed to access social networking sites from work as it keeps coming up in discussion...don't be shy...
Within reason yes, if someone is on any website all day it is a management issue and not for ICT to fix though.
Are you allowed to use social networks at work?
No Way locked down tighter than a drum
Why ? ICT say
wast of company time
Security
Performance
Strictly speaking my company bans social networking sites during office hours and uses Websense to enforce that. However, it frequently screws up and allows access at random times.
With practically everyone in the department from the director down on Facebook, it's all but encouraged! As an institution we're also making pretty decent use of Facebook to interact with current and potential customers (i.e. students), and they make exhaustive use of it. To try and implement any kind of ban would cause a riot!
As a general rule, being a research-intensive university, we don't block anything since you can never tell what people may want to legitimately research. We do have rules in place which state that the IT facilities are provided for academic/business use and significant abuses are dealt with.
Yes we're a University. A while back we did have a request to monitor web site usage for time wasting e.g. ebay but we argued not to do it. If people are wasting time they could just as easily be looking out of the window, reading the paper, having a smoke, it's a management issue, not an IT issue.
Dave
Access to social networking sites is no block.
I work for HE/FE college, when we decided to shape/block traffic to those sites, there was outcry.
Apparently they are classed as a "Valuable Educational resource". No idea how that conclusion was reached...
Sure are, but then at Sun we don't tend to try and control what people can do on the internet and assume, until proven otherwise, that employees are responsible adults that actually want to do their job. But then we also have a public blog site, wiki site and a very flexible working hours and location policy too.
Dave> You reminded of a recent post where I said "I can waste time without Facebook" :-)
Darren> I'm glad to hear that Sun is a progressive employer too
Good question Steve.
As Social Networking is actually a hot topic at the moment. According Surf Control/Web Sense website categorization Facebook, Orkut, Myspace is classified as Personals & Dating websites.
Therefore Personals & Dating websites are blocked according to our Internet Usage Policy.
BTW i work for Government in Sydney - Australia.
I like the comments from Dave Clark. We had similar issue management was asking to block ebay. I argued and mention its management issue not Security or IT.
Cheers
Shoaib
Nope, not allowed where I work…
HR directive, main reason employee productivity reasons…
Locked down in the office but open in the classrooms.
This seems to be historical. Hotmail blocked as well.
:)
I work for a very large Art Gallery and we allow empoyees full use of social networking, in fact we encourage them to use it collaboratively with artists, galleries and other organizations.
It is down to indididual line managers to control its use within their department and we have quite strict guidelines on its use in terms of what they can say about the organization.
