T
Thomas Mercer-Hursh
Guest
To be fair, this is hardly the first time that the issue of idle users has come up, so one shouldn't discount that some people see a problem here. It is just that disconnection is using a sledgehammer to solve the problem. I understand that people do open sessions and then minimize them and open new ones and thus end up with multiple sessions, only one of which is actually in use. Some people mistakenly see this as a license issue, but it can be a tuning or configuration problem, if nothing else. The difficulty comes in identifying the right candidates for disconnection. If one is at a main menu and one has something like a timer to update a clock on that menu, I have no problem with including a timer which will eventually log the session out if not reset. But, I would make that interval a lot more than 10 minutes. But, this does nothing at all for the user that goes into an inquiry and then leaves for lunch. That kind of situation is very hard to distinguish from someone who has painstakingly found the piece of information they need and then it takes a while to act on it, perhaps because of an interrupting telephone call or whatever. Log out that user and you will have an angry user. There is a lot here where one needs some simple mechanisms reinforced by user education and monitoring. A change that only impacts the main menu is very different from expecting something to work everywhere in every circumstance. An alert that one is already logged on is probably simple to implement and not offensive and yet likely to catch many issues.
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