Would you like to learn how to use a group policy to disconnect the Remote desktop users after a period of inactivity on Windows? In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a group policy to disconnect the remote desktop users after a 5 minutes period of inactivity.

• Windows 2012 R2
• Windows 2016
• Windows 2019
• Windows 10
• Windows 7

Hardware List:

The following section presents the list of equipment used to create this tutorial.

Every piece of hardware listed above can be found at Amazon website.

Tutorial GPO - Disconnect Remote desktop session after inactivity

On the domain controller, open the group policy management tool.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Management

Create a new group policy.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Objects

Enter a name for the new group policy.

Windows - Add GPO

In our example, the new GPO was named: MY-GPO.

On the Group Policy Management screen, expand the folder named Group Policy Objects.

Right-click your new Group Policy Object and select the Edit option.

Windows - Edit GPO

On the group policy editor screen, expand the User configuration folder and locate the following item.

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Access the folder named Session time limits.

GPO - Rdesktop Disconnect inactive connection

Enable the item named: Set time limit for active but IDLE Remote desktop service sessions.

Select the desired time limit for the inactive session.

GPO - Disconnect remote desctop inactive session

In our example, a  time limit of 5 minutes of inactivity was configured.

To save the group policy configuration, you need to close the Group Policy editor.

The system will present a warning message 2 minutes before disconnecting the Remote desktop session.

GPO - Remote desktop inactive session warning

Congratulations! You have finished the group policy configuration to disconnect idle sessions of the Remote desktop service after a time limit.

Tutorial GPO - Time limit for inactive Remote desktop session.

On the Group policy management screen, you need to right-click the Organizational Unit desired and select the option to link an existent GPO.

Windows-2012-Applocker application

In our example, we are going to link the group policy named MY-GPO to the root of the domain.

GPO- tutorial linking

After applying the GPO you need to wait for 10 or 20 minutes.

During this time the GPO will be replicated to other domain controllers.

In our example, we used a GPO to configure a time limit to inactive Remote desktop sessions.