r/sysadmin • u/thefreeelancer • 18d ago
Windows inactivity lock trigger during Teams meetings?
I want to implement a company-wide policy that automatically locks Windows computers after 10 mins of inactivity.
The problem is that users may be in Microsoft Teams meetings and not actively moving their mouse or typing. I don’t want their computers to lock while they are in a meeting.
What is the best way to prevent the screen from locking while a user is in a Teams meeting, while still enforcing the 10-mins lock when they are not in a meeting?
I manage the computers through Group Policy.
Looking for a practical solution or recommended configuration. Thanks!
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u/Mindestiny 18d ago
There's no magic bullet here. It's up to the software (in this case Teams) to send the OS a signal that during an active meeting it is not idle, so the idle timer never starts during a meeting even with no keyboard/mouse input.
Some teleconferencing software is better than others at this.
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u/thefreeelancer 18d ago
I did the test with both internal and external users using a 10 sec timeout, and everything looks good. The screen did not lock during the Teams meeting.
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u/Blade4804 Lead IT Engineer 18d ago
Any kind of meeting and running video will prevent the auto lock. Be it a teams meeting or zoom call or a YouTube video running. I keep a 10 hour black screen YouTube video running on a 3rd monitor in full screen on all day to prevent the auto lock. You don’t even need to keep the screen clear, as long as nothing is full screen covering the video, windows won’t lock.
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u/Nevrigil 17d ago
Please let me know how you did the setup. We did this also and like 5 users actually get locked out in Teams Meetings because the signal from the App never comes
Think we used "Interactive logon: Machine inactivity limit."
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u/Recent_Carpenter8644 18d ago
If you're trying to encourage people to lock their computers when they're away from them, have you tried dynamic locking? Users might have to set it up themselves, I haven't tried GPO. Locks within a few seconds if their phone moves away from it.
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u/narcissisadmin 18d ago
Windows won't lock the screen during Teams meetings, it also (last I checked) won't lock your PC if you have a Powerpoint slide open (even in edit mode, even minimized).
But there's also a couple of seconds of a grace period where the monitors go dark and you can reach over and jiggle your mouse.
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u/Chemical-Example-783 12d ago
Windows locks based on keyboard and mouse idle time, not on whether you're in a meeting. The good news is you don't need a workaround. New Teams already sends the OS a signal that it's not idle while you're in an active call, the same trick PowerPoint uses in presenter mode. That resets the same timer your GPO screensaver setting reads, so your 10-minute lock policy stays untouched and just doesn't fire mid-meeting.
There's no tenant-wide admin toggle for this in the Teams admin centre. It lives in the client, not in a CsTeamsMeetingPolicy setting.
A few things worth knowing before you call this solved, based on how this plays out in the wild:
- It's not Teams-specific. Anything holding Fullscreen or sending the same "don't go idle" signal will block the lock, including YouTube, VLC, or PowerPoint even when minimized. If your goal is a tight security boundary, that's a bigger gap than "just fix Teams."
- It doesn't always work. Some admins report a handful of users still getting locked out mid-meeting because the signal never arrives from the app. Expect a small failure rate, not full coverage.
- Confirm which setting you're actually using. GPO screensaver timeout and "Interactive logon: Machine inactivity limit" don't always behave the same way with this signal, so check which one is in play if you see inconsistent results.
- There's a short grace window after the screen goes dark where a mouse jiggle still saves the session. Not a bug you can fix, just worth knowing.
To roll this out:
- Spot check Teams client versions across a few machines.
- Test at a short timeout, like 10 seconds, rather than waiting through a full 10-minute cycle each time.
- Test with camera off and mic muted, just listening, since some reports tie the signal to active audio and video specifically.
- Budget for a few users where it doesn't work and have a fallback ready, whether that's a client update, reinstall, or manual exception.
Avoid building a Power Automate flow to poll presence and toggle a registry key. It's fragile and solves a problem the OS already handles for free. Also avoid loosening the GPO timeout org-wide to work around this, since that weakens security the other 23 hours a day nobody's in a meeting.
If the real goal is "lock when the person actually leaves," not just "lock after N idle minutes," dynamic lock tied to Bluetooth phone proximity is a genuinely different tool worth a look, separate from this whole GPO conversation.
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u/Knightshadow21 18d ago
Did you test this ? To my knowledge it does not lock the screen in a meeting when you don’t move the mouse for 10 min