In this business climate it is important that your employees are as productive as possible. It is also no secret that a limited number of employees might spend a lot of time surfing the web. Many businesses are not in a position to setup a web monitoring system, and most do not want to become an electronic nanny. A quick solution to view employees surfing history if they have not deleted it is to use a couple of great utilities.
These utilities come from NirSoft which offer a multitude of computer utilities in addition to these two. Any of the utilities that I have used do not need to be installed so you can run them from a network share or a USB flash drive.
The utilities for listing browsing history are IEHistoryView and MozillaHistoryView. Each are downloaded as a small ZIP file. Uncompress the folders and then take them to the machine of the employee. You will not need to install either application, and you will be able to view the browsing history even if you are not logged in as the user.
The way that you switch user views does differ for each utility. In IEHistoryView for Internet Explorer you simply click on the head icon in the upper left hand corner. You can then choose the profile of your computer user. The MozillaHistoryView for the Firefox browser is not so straightforward. You will need to drill down to the history file location. The easiest way to do this is that when you change the history file location under the File menu be sure to note the original location. Your target location is probably the same except for the different user name.