The environment I work in has quite a few policies around the use of IT aimed at security.
One of these is that screen savers MUST be enable, and must kick in automatically after 5 minutes at most.
Once triggered, a screen saver MUST require a password before the machine can be unlocked again.
The problem is the we are often engaged in setting up demonstrations and trials involving a large number of machine, but few actually operators or users. Quite a few machines simply running background task or just being used to display information on a large screen or projector, without any intention of interactive use during normal operation.
Having started to tinker a bit with PowerShell recently(ish) and trying a few things out, my mind has been getting these: I wonder if it could do this? type moments and one of them is this:
Could Powershell be used, perhaps in combination with other appropriate tools, to sort of synchronise the screen saver activity of a bunch of networked computers? I.e. No screen saver on any of the machines will kick in, if ANY of the machines on the network has had any interactive use in the last five minutes.
This would save a lot of running around prior to formal demonstrations and tests to make sure machines are woken up, and the constant mouse jiggling required to keep things visible during the session.