Product Review: ManagerAssistant

Following is my review of the product "ManagerAssistant"

ManagerAssistant.com is a company which develops Workforce Management Software.




One of its products is titled the same, i.e. the product is named ManagerAssistant.


The current version of this product is 3.0. A detailed description of the product is available here - http://www.managerassistant.com/products.html
If you just feel like going through a tour, the link goes here - http://www.managerassistant.com/tour.html


What is ManagerAssistant?
To put it in simple words, ManagerAssistant is a software that helps managers for employee management.

This software empowers managers to track, evaluate, and control the behavior, performance, and activities of employees.

From a single application, ManagerAssistant software addresses the following workforce management processes and activities:

Employee review
Employee information tracking and monitoring
Hiring and recruitment
Employee evaluation
Employee attendance tracking
Employee appraisal
Vacation tracking
Incident tracking
Paid time off tracking
Employee goals
Employee training & development administration
Employee HR detailed info

Free Demo Download.

There is a free demo download available; unfortunately, this requires you to register. This may not be such a good idea where you force upon the visitors to register to download a demo.

Anyways, I can tell you a hack how to avoid the registration.

This is a php website and you can directly use this link to download the demo without registering - http://www.managerassistant.com/download.php

The download was very slow(at least for me) - it took almost an hour to download the exe file.

You did better use Download Accelerator Plus(DAP), which is available here for free - http://www.speedbit.com/

Using DAP I was able to download in almost 5-7 mins. The file is approx 111 MB.

System Requirements

- Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® Vista, XP Home/Pro, Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4 Pro, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003

- Intel Pentium® or compatible processor (700 MHz or greater)

- 512 MB RAM or greater

- 150 MB disk space

- SVGA with 256 colors (1024 x 768 with 16-bit color recommended)

Installation

Double click the executable and the installer opens up, the follow up is pretty simple. Unfortunately, the installer does not give me the option of choosing the installation directory.

The files are installed under C:\Program Files\ManagerAssistant.com\ManagerAssistant 3.0\

There is only a windows version of this product, they do not have a Linux or anything else.

If you have an earlier version of ManagerAssistant, you can even migrate the data to the new version.

Once the Installation is over, just double click on the icon to open the application.

The front page shows up like below.

Reminders: There is a set of reminders on the left hand side, you can even view only the reminders that were set by you alone.

You can view reminders for 1. For the day 2. For the week 3. For the Month

Also present is a calendar with the current date highlighted.

CheckList: Here you can add any number of folders and TO-DO list. The Completed items appear in Blue color, Pending items in Green and Overdue items in Red.

Employees Tab:

This is a very useful tab and gives the complete information of the employee.

Just right click on the right taq and you get the list of columns.

There are a total of pre-defined 79 columns and you can select/deselect these columns.

Unfortunately, there is no way to add your own columns. And you cannot re-name these columns.

You can add/edit/delete an employee record and the best of these I think is the "email as pdf" feature. This will email the emp record in a pdf.

You can filter the records, There are a variety of reports which are very good.
The data can be exported in the form of grid in 4 types - XML, HTML, Text, XLS

Attendance Tab

This is another important tab in the product. Very helpful to track the attendance of the employees.

This can be very useful when the you have employees who are employed part-time as well as full-time.

There are 4 sub tabs
1. Calendar View
2. Table View
3. Attendance overview
4. Employee Year View

The salient features here include:
a. You can select the columns to view.
b. You can sort the columns.
c. Adding an attachment to the details is allowed.
d.

Allows marking for different types of attendance out reasons like: bereavement, maternity, medical, sick, late/tardy, vacation, comp time, military duty, floating, jury duty and more.

Never a days the employee attendance is recorded by the magnetic swiping of the emp ID card at the entrance door.

It would be great if this applicaiton can be import data on a day to day basis from the the server. May be that needs a plugin or something to be added to acheive that???

Here is a report for attendance I created. This is Bar Graph created from the existing data.

Performance Review Tab

This can be used to produce reviews of employees within a short time, no need of storing the data in word formats etc...

You can send out reminder emails as well and there is self calculating ratings. You can modify the ratings and change the categories, weighted averages etc.

Also other features include - spell check, thesaurus, email as pdf, print hte reviews.

Below is a snapshot of the Review details.

The Goals Tab

This can be used to create a set of goals for the employees which they need to accomplish over a period of time. One advantage here is you can keep track of the progress of the employees.

This is how the goals tab looks like.

The Incidents Tab

Helps you to keep track of any incident that happened. This can be any good or bad incident.

You can add an attachment, Also note the plan of action.

The accomplishments Tab

Whenever an employee acheives something, you need to keep track of that, lest you may forget. The managers need to keep track of all the employees and they may forget the employee acheivements.

This tool can be very useful to keep track of the accomplishments and the employees who accomplish something great should be given bonus.

The Training Tab

Helpful in keeping track of the training a candidate takes during his employment.

The Recruitment Tab

This is helpful in recruiting.

1. you can enter the data of the candidates applying.

2. If he is selected, you can convert him into an employee - should add the employee data at the time.

But what I was looking for here the flow of recruitment process. Like when 1st round of interview is over, he(first interviewer) should be able to transfer the candidate to the second interviewer.

And then the next interviewer. Unfortunately this is missing. Generally this process is very tedious and people send emails. An application would be good.

The Expenses Tab

You can add your expenses reports here.

Customers

Here is a list of customers including which ManagerAssistant has.

Pricing

Single-User Edition Version3.0 $395.00
Network/Multi-User Edition Version 3.0 Starting at $895.00

Documentation:

The help and documentation provided with the app is very good.

Un-installation

They do not provide a un-installer link in the start - programs menu. Nor do they provide a unistall.exe in the installed directory.

You need to go to the control panel to unistall the product.

Summary

The website of ManagerAssistant is good, but it would be good if they can come up with something better. I was able to download the app by-passing the registration form.

ManasgerAssistant is a good application, with a lot of features all integrated. I found the “Employee” tab and the “Performance Review” tabs very useful. The attendance tab is also good but I was wondering if there was an integration with the swiping card attendance. If there can be a way by which we can integrate the attendance with the app, then the time-in, time-out of the employees can be noted and also the attendance. Also there should be a way by which the employees can apply for vacation through the intranet, and the app should update itself automatically.

Definitely this is a very good app for the Managers and can save a lot of time and imporve the productivity.

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Disclaimer: Do not make a purchase based on this review; I suggest you to Download ManagerAssistant, test it for a few days and see if you like it yourself.

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