Systems Management

Hmmmm....without some Systems Management type of setup...you are going to be hard pressed to get this to work.

First off...you need an agent to monitor whether the user is inactive....then the agent has to do a shut down.

Unless you WMI script this somehow....I don't see an easy path to what you need.

I just thought of something.

You could create a GPO that sets the Power Management on the workstation so that it powers it off after a certain time of inactivity.

So first power down the monitor and then the hard disks and then system shutdown.

It might work.

Another possibility is to set screensaver settings via GPO to a predetermined time and to lock when the screensaver is activated.

I have the same requirement, but have a bit more info - there is a screensaver called winexit (available with the Win 2003 Resource Kit - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314999&sd=tech) which will log the PC right off when the screensaver kicks in. It's configurable etc. Question - how does one deploy a screensaver (possibly with settings in place because you cannot do much more than turn a screensaver on or off with GPO) via SMS?

1) Copy the ".scr" file somewhere that it will always be accessible.

2) Change the following registry key to reflect the above path:

"HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\SCRNSAVE.EXE"

3) Adjust the timeout with the following key:

"HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaveTimeOut"

4) Copy a preconfigured "Control.ini" file to the "%SystemRoot%" folder.

[Screen Saver.Logoff]
ForceLogoff=0
CountDownTimer=90
DialogMessage=Whatever you like...

Alternatively, this can be done with Desktop Authority from Scriptlogic.
In our company a lot of users usually forget to log off from their computers, but some activities like weekly defragmentation and updates are applied at log off. We solved this problem with the inactivity feature of Desktop Authority. All of our computers will log off after an hour of inactivity. The interesting thing is that we can specify the period of time when this inactivity will be monitored. For example, we can choose to exclude weekends.