Locking computers using the password protected screensaver

I am trying to find out how to use the 'password protected screensaver' to lock individual computers within our network after a specified time period. The only way I know how to do this now is at each computer but it seems to be login specific and I'd like to control it system-wide. Is this possible?

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To use the 'password protected screensaver' system-wide, you will need to have Active Directory up and running. You will also need to decide if system-wide includes all employees, or just a few. After you make these decisions, you will create a GPO in Active Directory (typically using Group Policy Management Console) and link it to an Active Directory node. You will link to the domain if you want all employees to receive the policy. This will include executives, IT admins, power users, developers, etc. If you want to narrow the scope, you will link the GPO to an organizational unit containing only the user accounts that you want to affect.

After you have the GPO linked and configured, you will configure the "User Configuration|Administrative Templates|Control Panel|Display" node to configure the following two policies:

1) Screen Saver Executable Name
2) Password Protect the Screen Saver

This was first published in August 2005

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