[1803, au] Corporate Screensaver for idle machines in classrooms

[sonic1485]

Morning all. I have been asked to look in to deploying a corporate screensaver to our classrooms, essentially turning them in to digital signage. I have seen paid for solutions such as:

 

https://www.alert-software.com/corporate-screensaver

https://www.snapcomms.com/products/corporate-screensaver

https://www.netpresenter.com/corporate-screensaver/

 

but what with budgets being... ya know... not there, we would ideally like a managed solution which points to a single screensaver which then displays on idle desktops.

 

I have half a solution using Group Policies but the screensaver only becomes active for idle, logged in sessions. Ideally we would like this to come on when users are logged off too.

 

I was just wondering if anyone knew of any free solutions or an alternative way you have gone about doing this with Windows 10 machines?

[Steve21]

For logged off users you can bodge the regkey to apply to "default user" which is basically system so it still applies.

 

Example below (You can do it simpler, but we use the photo rotation screensaver so point it to a folder)

 

Steve

Edited July 17, 2018 by Steve21

[Arthur]

which is basically system

HKEY_USERS\.Default actually is the profile for the Local System account.

[Steve21]

HKEY_USERS\.Default actually is the profile for the Local System account.

 

Apart from the fact you need 19 too which isn't thus basically!

 

Steve

[Arthur]

Apart from the fact you need 19 too which isn't thus basically!

If you didn't use the Windows Photo Viewer screensaver couldn't you get away with setting only the first three registry values (1-3) in your screenshot if you had a self-contained .SCR slideshow?

 

That said, your idea is much easier since you don't have to regenerate SCR files all of the time and you can simply change the EncryptedPIDL value to point to a different folder if you have different sets of photos.

Edited July 17, 2018 by Arthur

[Steve21]

If you have a standalone one yep you don't need the 19s and can just use default, but we don't bother changing the pidl, we just have a script on the computers that do a robocopy mirror on startup to the network folder so if the images change on the server they'll update on the computers etc, unless you mean different sets running at once?

 

Steve

[sonic1485]

Thanks both that's worked perfectly!