One timeout for every user is how policies get hated. The counter terminal that serves customers and the back-office desktop doing reports live in different worlds - RDS collections let you set limits per group, so each gets the number that fits.
The fastest way to make users hate session limits is to give a shared billing counter and a senior accountant the same timeout. The counter should lock down in minutes - customers and the next operator are standing right there. The accountant's session, mid-reconciliation, deserves hours. A single server-wide number gets both of them wrong.
If you run a real Remote Desktop Services deployment, you already own the right tool: collections. A collection is a named group of users and servers, and each collection carries its own session settings. This page shows how to use them deliberately, and the one conflict - with Group Policy - that you must understand before you start.
Open Server Manager, go to Remote Desktop Services, then Collections. Select your collection and open Properties (Tasks > Edit Properties). The Session section holds the family of controls:
Choose end the session in the third setting when the goal is a real logoff that frees memory and licences.
Start from the work, not from the numbers. Ask three questions per collection: Is the terminal shared with the public or other staff? How long are the natural pauses in this work? Does anything here run long unattended jobs?
Write the reasoning next to the numbers in your server documentation. The next admin should inherit a design, not a mystery.
Here is the trap that wastes afternoons: session limits can be set in both collection properties and Group Policy (under Session Time Limits), and when a Group Policy setting is configured, it is the one that applies. An admin edits the collection, nothing changes, and the afternoon disappears into troubleshooting.
Pick one management plane and record the choice. Collections are the better plane when groups genuinely differ, because the settings travel with the collection's purpose. Group Policy is the better plane when you want one rule stamped identically across many hosts. What you cannot do is half-manage it in both places.
Collections are also your rollout tool. Create the strict collection, move a pilot group into it, and let them live with the limits for a week while everyone else stays on the gentle collection. Complaints arrive from five people you can talk to, not fifty you cannot.
When a user's role changes - counter staff promoted to back office - moving them to the right collection is the whole adjustment. No policy surgery, no per-user hacks, and the settings they get finally match the work they do.
Different does not mean absent. Even the most generous collection should end disconnected sessions eventually - a day is a common ceiling - because the disconnected pile is where stale logins, locked files and Monday-morning surprises breed.
The only sessions with truly no limits should be named exception accounts under the review discipline from the exception-list page in this set. Collections are for groups of humans; exceptions are for specific, owned, reviewed workloads.
The video shows the complete auto logoff setup for idle RDP users, click by click. Watch it end to end before you change a production server.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIn Server Manager, go to Remote Desktop Services, then Collections, open your collection's Properties and edit the Session section. There you can set the disconnected-session limit, the idle-session limit, and whether a reached limit disconnects the user or ends the session entirely.
Most likely a Group Policy is also configuring session time limits for the same session hosts, and Group Policy wins over collection settings. Either manage the limits in Group Policy for all hosts, or remove the GPO settings and manage per collection - but do not split the job between both.
Yes - that is exactly what collections are for. Each collection carries its own session settings, so a shared counter collection can log off idle users in 15 minutes while a reports collection on the same host allows several hours. The limits follow the collection the user connects through.