I have an internal line-of-business web application that is used on a daily basi

Question

I have an internal line-of-business web application that is used on a daily basis by multiple employees. I would like to start gathering information about how they are using the software on a day-to-day basis.

Because they use the software for a significant portion of the day, I would like to record across multiple days, but I don't want accidentally capture web usage that is not related to this application.

Is there any screen recording software for Windows that triggers a recording when the browser has focus and has a specific URL base in the navigation bar? The recording should stop if the browser loses focus, or the user navigates to a different page.

Ideally I would like to only capture the browser window and provide timestamps in order to see the how the users interact with the application over the course of a full day.

Explanation / Answer

Thinking out of the box I would say that you would be better off setting up your servers logging in an appropriate manner and using a server logfile browser/analyser to get the information that you desire. Most, if not all, web servers support this as it is a key to debugging web site problems.

There are several reasons to do this:

It will be browser independent - i.e. it will not depend on which browser is used.
It will only depend on the settings on one machine rather than all of the employees.
You will not get false positives, where the user types a similar URL.
If the user switches tabs you will not be recording what is happening in the other tab.
You will not have to gather the logs in some way from the users machines.
The logs will be in text format rather than video - smaller and much easier to analyse.
You can easily control the size/age of the logs and your server is likely to have more space than the client machines.
Recording logs of what goes on on your server is not invasion of privacy in any jurisdiction that I know of and the jurisdiction that applies in the server location should rule but recording what happens on employees machines is invasion of privacy in numerous locations and the jurisdiction or where the machine is may apply.

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