User capabilities & forced features

This page covers three cards in the desktop policy:

• User capabilities — what employees can do inside the desktop app.
• Forced features — behaviours employees cannot turn off.
• Locks — restrictions on what employees can configure.

They all share the same shape: a row per setting, an icon, a description, and a toggle.

User capabilities

Auto-resume tracking after sleep or restart

When on (default), recording automatically resumes:

• After the computer wakes from sleep, if it was recording before.
• After the tracker relaunches (e.g. after a reboot), if it was recording before.

When off, the prior session is saved cleanly, but the employee must press Play to start a new session after every wake / reboot.

If Force tracking to be on while the app is open is enabled in the Forced features card, that takes precedence — auto-resume is effectively forced on regardless of this setting.

Forced features

These all default to off. Turning any of them on removes one of the employee's escape hatches. Pick the smallest set that gets you the protection you actually need.

Force the app to always run

When on:

• The tracker auto-launches at login so the employee can't forget to start it.
• The tracker cannot be quit from the employee's tray / menubar icon. The Quit menu item is greyed out.

If a specific employee needs to quit the app (e.g. for IT troubleshooting), an admin can authorise a one-time shutdown by entering an owner email + password directly in the desktop app's settings.

Prevent employees from signing out

When on, the tracker's Sign out button is disabled. The device stays pinned to the employee's work account; no other ScreenJournal account can sign in from that machine.

Like the Quit option above, an admin can authorise a one-time sign-out with their credentials when genuinely needed.

Force tracking to be on while the app is open

When on, the tracker's Pause button is disabled. As long as the app is open, recording is on.

This is the strictest tracking setting. It overrides the auto-resume toggle (the app behaves as if auto-resume is always on) and is incompatible with letting employees take un-tracked breaks.

Enforce screen recording

When on, screen recording cannot be turned off inside the desktop app — even if the employee had it on a "Disabled" recording mode locally. The org policy's Recording mode remains in charge of what gets done with the recording (analyse / save), but the channel itself stays active.

Enforce meeting capture on

The audio analogue of Enforce screen recording. When on, meeting capture cannot be disabled from inside the desktop app.

Locks

Lock meeting-app allowlist

The meeting-app allowlist is the list of applications whose microphone activity triggers audio capture. It lives inside the desktop app's own settings — by default, the employee can edit it (adding Zoom, Meet, Teams, etc.).

When this lock is on, the employee can see the allowlist but cannot edit it. New entries can only be added by an admin, via the desktop app's authenticated admin flow.

Tips on rolling forced features out

• Communicate before you turn them on. Surprise lockouts are the #1 way to lose your team's trust on a monitoring product.
• Try team-scoped overrides first. If only one department needs the strictest settings, override them just for that team's scope.
• Combine forced + recording-mode carefully. Setting Enforce screen recording + Record + Save + Force tracking + Force the app to always run together is the strictest combination ScreenJournal supports. Make sure your data-retention policy matches; this combination produces a lot of stored video.