I've been tasked with locking computers automatically after 5 minutes of inactivity, so I set up the 'Interactive logon inactivity limit' through Group Policy. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work at all. I found a guide online and followed the steps to enable screen saver settings like enabling the screen saver, password protecting it, and setting a time limit for the screen saver. Now the screen saver timeout works, but users are complaining that their screens lock during Teams meetings. In my tests, everything seems fine and `powercfg /requests` indicates that Teams is active. Has anyone encountered this issue and can provide some help? Please keep in mind that I'm just implementing this policy, not making these decisions myself.
5 Answers
You might want to roll back the policy changes you've made. It's often a good idea to implement only one change at a time and monitor it for a week to identify what's causing the problem.
One reason screens lock during meetings is that Teams meetings often don’t count as ‘activity’ if there's no keyboard or mouse input. Just audio or video might not reset the idle timer. You should check if the screen saver policy is what's triggering the lock instead of the inactivity timeout. Sometimes, the screen saver settings end up being the only ones that really take effect. It’s worth checking if Teams registers in `powercfg /requests` during a meeting—sometimes it doesn’t properly register as active, leading to the lock. You may need to enable presentation mode or increase the inactivity timeout a bit to prevent these locks during meetings.
Honestly, that 5-minute timeout seems a bit extreme. It might be easier to train users to use Win+L instead and extend the timeout to 10 or 15 minutes. Back in my day, we handled unlocked sessions with a little humor—like changing wallpapers to those cute bouquets of... you know what! That definitely raised awareness!
That last line you wrote sounds like someone who has dealt with Stack Overflow's crew—always ready to question your motives!
At my workplace, if someone left their computer unlocked, we’d send a message from their account to the whole team bragging about how great they were! Totally called them out in a fun way.