Online vs. desktop time tracking software

Today, when business owners and managers aspire to maximize the productivity of each particular employee to intensify the overall usage of their organizations’ working hours, these superiors try implementing different time tracking solutions enabling them to optimize schedules and priority list of their workers. While selecting such a solution they face a challenge – what to select: the desktop package which is installed in the office, or online time tracking software that works remotely via the Web. Let’s consider these two types to define the difference:

Desktop Software – this kind of computer-based systems enables people to operate with their electronic time management instruments (calendars, timesheets, etc) while the system is installed on their computers, in other words desktop time tracking practice has the following features:

• Desktop applications are installed on computers of their users (in other words these applications are delivered as usual installable setup files);
• They use their own shells to drive their interfaces and maintain operations there (in other words they work in their own windows, but not in windows of some web-browsers), so in order to reach your data you just need to launch them, without having any problems with compatibility of web-browsers, etc;
• Time tracking desktop programs can be easily deployed inside of the LAN (local corporate network), so their databases are stored at your corporate server, and they don’t need any Internet connection to work;

Online Software – this kind of computer-based systems enables people to operate with electronic time management instruments while the system is NOT installed on their workstations, so online time tracking technology has the following traits:

• Web based solutions don’t need to be installed on computers of users (in the most of cases they are not delivered as installable files);

• Online time tracking solutions use facilities of web-browsers (like Opera, Mozilla Firefox, IE) to drive their interfaces and maintain operations there (in other words they work using Web-technologies such as PHP, HTML, Flash, etc);
• Web based time tracking solutions usually cannot be established in the LAN (those which allow this need some advanced IT-wise efforts to accomplish), their databases are usually stored at remote servers, and they critically need Internet connection to work (actually due to this they are called time tracking ONLINE solutions);

Benefits of Time Tracking Desktop Application:

Time tracking desktop applications are good for stable teams working at long-term projects, and for serious organizations which take care of their informative security and confidentiality, because such software products always function under control of the company’s own IT workgroup that ensures its workability, protection and backups as appropriate (unlike many of web-based time tracking solutions that host all your corporate data on their remote servers, and cannot guarantee you a really good level of security). VIP Task Manager is a good example of effective desktop software that provides you with online time tracking reviews (demo-tours) and trial versions to examine its functionality.

Benefits

The web-based time tracking software provides capabilities for easy adding and removing accounts of users (you can easily disable and add them via administrative panels of such products, along with easy changing of your licensing plan based on number of collaborating users). Also, the functionality means that such a program can be entered to review data from any place from all over the world (only if the Internet connection is available there). All these facts make the web-based time tracking software an ideal solution for virtual teams (temporal workgroups assembled of distantly working professionals). Owing to this fact, online time tracking tools are not very convenient for stable organizations, because once Internet connection appears down, the interface will become just unreachable.