Hi all,

Great work on Workrave v1.10. I work in I.T. Services at an education establishment and we are looking into making this available to all staff PCs at work. We have drawn up a policy to set a specific break times, away from screen & exercises, etc. But there is no easy way to allow us to globally set the workrave policy to all PCs.

What I would like to see is a easy way to apply the policy to all users with the same policy (and stop them from changing them) - maybe have Workrave to point to a network location to "read" a config file and automatically update the settings upon logging in.

Is this doable?

(In reply to comment #0)

I guess this is technically doable, it's just that it is (in my opinion) a very bad idea.

Workrave is about interrupting the user and forcing him to take breaks. In doing so, there are dangers and benefits. Benefits would include that the user gets some rest and some recommended exercises. Dangers include taking some control away from the user, likely frustrating him while doing so. Frustration is more than likely to contribute to computer-related complaints, quite the opposite of workrave's intended goal.

In addition to that, people are different. Personally, I have workrave configured to interrupt me often. I need this to stay healthy and will refuse to work (for extended periods of time) on a computer that will not interrupt me according to my schedule. On the other hand, nearly everyone else I've met would go completely crazy if they had to work with my settings.

In summary, I'm very much in favor of recommending some settings to people, but not allowing them to change the settings is (again, in my opinion) a bad idea.

May I ask why you want to force your users to stick to a schedule you dictate?

(In reply to comment #1)

Thank you for the reply and for explaining.

You asked... "May I ask why you want to force your users to stick to a schedule you dictate?"

I do not have the answer to this. Our Health & Safety/HR department has asked to see if this is possible after searching for a suitable one and none was found, so I am trying to find out if this is doable or not.

While I agree with your views, I think it might be useful to have this feature added and allowing the control to us so we can tweak it as per to H&S/HR policy and giving us better control, as opposite to what you think is right and wrong. 

Maybe even have some sort of mini database (flat file format?) hosted on network drive to include/exclude Windows logon usernames so they will not have this controlled policy if they requested and leave the settings to themselves.

I hope this make sense.

Thanks.