Hello all! I am not much of a programmer for Windows itself. I mostly work with ASP.NET and SharePoint. Not to mention, anything I do is extremely basic.
Our firm recently acquired Sophos Endpoint Security and Control and I was under the impression it would allow us not only to monitor our "endpoints" as they call them (client PCs), but also allow us to block our employees from accessing certain files.
Now to my point: How hard would it be to have a simple light-weight program run hidden from view that can detect when someone is trying to open a file with an extension that we specify and block access to it unless it is in an allowed location?
For example, our firm allows employees to stream multimedia and listen to music CDs here at work, BUT some people tend to use our "public" or "P:" drive to copy music to and share out with each other. We want to stop people from opening .MP3s or .AVIs or .WAVs that are located anywhere except their own CD-ROM or an admin-specified network folder. The reason being that we have biologists here who listen to bird calls and some other stuff and have those files and other legitimate reasons for multimedia files and don't want those blocked. Saving files to the network drives is not of concern because our servers detect these file extensions and during backups and it already notifies us of their existence and the employees who created them are dealt with accordingly. We just want to stop other people from getting or opening them because that is undetectable as of yet with our current setup.
Am I asking for something wholly unrealistic? My boss has been looking for a solution like this for years now and it would be a great benefit for companies who fear the possible $250,000 fine per unlicensed song if we were to be audited. One of our firm chairmen has a colleague who had employees that shared music files all over the place and they ended up getting shut down with having to fork out over $3,000,000 in fines a few years ago because of some incredibly thoughtless employees!!! Needless to say, our owners fear this a lot.
If I am not being clear enough, I'll reiterate this if you need.
I am willing to take 6 months of my career to learn Windows Forms in C# to create a program like this that will be stable and sufficient for our needs, but I am looking for a quicker solution if it's out there. =)