Net monitor attracts interest

An internet use monitoring tool developed by a Wellingtonian man is attracting interest from schools and tertiary institutes here and across the Tasman.

An internet use monitoring tool developed by a Wellingtonian man is attracting interest from schools and tertiary institutes here and across the Tasman.

Richard Bourne (pictured right) says a unique feature of InGOT is its ability to calculate individuals’ net use and deny them access if they exceed limits set by the InGOT licensee.

InGOT works by converting users’ time on the net into a dollar value and blocks their access if they go into debit. It also records what sites users have been visiting, says Bourne. He developed InGOT while IT manager at the then-Central Institute of Technology in Lower Hutt in the late 1990s before selling it to Innovus, where he also worked.

When Wellington IT consultancy Synergy took over Innovus, Brown didn’t transfer and decided to buy back the InGOT intellectual property. It is sold through e-commerce infrastructure provider Liverton, where Bourne now works.

Bourne, who is working on translating InGOT into Japanese, says he’s searched English and Japanese-language products but hasn’t found anything else that works by debiting users’ accounts.

As well as the New Zealand sites, nine Australian schools are using the product. Getting InGOT into the education market meant configuring it for Novell Netware, which many schools and tertiary institutes use.

InGOT was first developed for Windows NT and works with Microsoft’s proxy server or Novell BorderManager.

Christchurch Polytechnic IT director Kevin Adamson says the institution has been using InGOT for several years.

“Richard’s done a number of enhancements to suit our operating environment, to allow InGOT to interface with Novell’s directory services and to work with more than one proxy server.”

InGOT allows the Polytech to “get a good handle” on where students are surfing, he says and when the decision to use it was made, “there weren’t too many alternatives in terms of net accounting systems”.

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