eBlaster Reviewer's Comments
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eBlaster, from Spectorsoft, is an excellent product. Where SpectorSoft's Spector Pro is ranked as the best overall spyware-monitoring product, eBlaster would be ranked as the best product if remote management and remote reporting were required. eBlaster didn't receive an actual "Excellent" rating because of a few missing features that would be crucial in an overall monitoring requirement. Primarily, someone looking at reporting on the local computer should be able to see screen snapshots. If screenshots are not a requirement and remote reporting is, then eBlaster is the answer for you. SpectorSoft does provide another product called Spector Pro that was chosen as our highest ranked product. It would be nice if SpectorSoft combined the two products some day. The two products do work in harmony with each other if you are considering purchasing both. If you want a product where you can view the activity results on the computer being monitored, then Spector Pro is the right product. If you want a product where all of the activity results can be viewed remotely, from any other computer, then you need eBlaster from SpectorSoft. You can read the review of Spector Pro here at Monitoring Software Review.
Feature Set:
eBlaster is built around the concept of being able to review activity reports, notifications, and remote management from a distance. For example, when an email is sent or received on the monitored computer, eBlaster can also forward a copy of the email to whom-ever is specified. You can also specify to forward attachments. This is all done in the background and no trace of the sent email is left in your email client, like Outlook Express. It works the same way with Chat and Instant Messaging, recoding both sides of the conversation and forwarding the information in an email to the specified recipient.
eBlaster also has an additional purchasable feature that allows you to perform a Remote Install. This allows you to install it from a distance or from another computer. This would be a handy feature for someone with kids that live elsewhere or employers who might have multiple office locations.
Ease of Use:
Reading the reports is very simple. It takes some time to get familiar with the report, but once you have thoroughly looked at the report, you will know exactly where to look the next time around. Most of the major email clients, web mail, chat, and Instant Messaging are supported in the recording of data.
Ease of Installation:
When you set up eBlaster, you need to make sure you understand what you are asking for. You might get more copies of email, chat, instant messaging, application usage, and web surfing than what you asked for. You can specify how often you want the reports delivered to you in an email, from as often as every 1 minute or specifying once a day at a particular time during the day.
Monitoring Effectiveness:
eBlaster 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.
Help/Documentation:
The Help is excellent. It contains context sensitive Help on most pages and also has online access to additional Help and a Knowledge Database.
Summary:
eBlaster is an excellent product that doesn't impact computer speed. For someone interested in remote monitoring, eBlaster is by far the best product in the marketplace and would receive our highest ratings. In some respects, the product should be in a class of its own – remote spyware, but we felt it was important to be considered in our reviews.
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