Higher-ed group ensures compliance with French “right to disconnect” law

  • Talis Education Group
  • Higher Education
  • France

Talis Education Group is a network of higher education institutions based in the French city of Bergerac that specializes in vocational training and professional development.

“Relying on cumbersome PowerShell scripts to define working hours and access times natively in Active Directory revealed a pressing need for a more robust solution. We needed a different approach that would give us better visibility, easier management and more fine control over employee access.”

David Touton - IT Director

The Challenge

Finding a simpler way to enforce policies around France’s employee "right to disconnect" law

Introduced in 2017, France’s rules around the "right to disconnect" ("droit à la déconnexion") were designed to limit the encroachment of digital technologies such as email and collaboration platforms on employees’ home life.

Unfortunately, while the principle is simple, meeting the rules is not always easy. HR departments can ask employees to log off at specific times and locations, but enforcing this presents technical challenges.

Initially, the Talis Education Group IT team used PowerShell script to enforce policies on working hours and access times but this proved time consuming to manage across the organization’s 300-employee workforce access divided between local on-premises, VPN, Office 365 and cloud applications.

The Solution

UserLock lets the IT team enforce the "right to disconnect" through the AD policies they are already familiar with

After assessing different products, in 2023 Talis Education Group opted for UserLock because it offered an easy-to-configure way to manage and block employee access through Active Directory (AD) Group Policies (GPOs) without the chore of manual scripting.

After deploying the user agent to devices using the UserLock console, this allowed the IT team to set access limits based on time of the day monitored through an employee dashboard.

Importantly, different types of employee access could be managed using granular policies that took into account different working patterns across the organization.

Another advantage of UserLock is that it is designed for on-premises AD management, which works well with the organization’s desire to retain control over AD.

"The web interface is excellent, making it easy to control access over problem time periods such as evenings, weekends and public holidays."

David Touton - IT Director

The Result

The HR department has a clear view of the organization’s compliance with "right to disconnect"

The installation of UserLock has hugely simplified employee time management, previously an unreliable hassle.

The IT team has gained in terms of productivity because UserLock has made it easy to configure new users as well as manage current ones. Exceptions can be configured where this is necessary, since UserLock has the fine control to configure access right down to individual user level.

The HR department is also happy because they know the organization is on top of the "right to disconnect" complete with a dashboard that monitors and logs access.

"This has simplified what was previously a difficult process of managing employee working hours. HR no longer needs to worry about who is working or not working. That's on top of UserLock's many other benefits, such as the ability to manage multi-factor authentication (MFA), which we use to secure Office 365 access."

David Touton - IT Director