Idle Session timeout for SharePoint 2013 Appiications

Question

Hi All,

Today we received a new requirement from our client to enable Session time-out in SharePoint 2013.

Once idle time outreached, the application should show a popup message to the user and redirect to the home page of the site.

Our Production Environment is a one-way forest trust with Single sign-on enabled. Web applications are using claims authentication.

We tried some of the option to set time-out like

1. Enable security validation timeout setting in Central Administration.
2. Change the session timeouts in SharePoint sites using PowerShell Script below.

   $tokenservice = Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig 
   $tokenservice.UseSessionCookies = $true 
   $tokenservice.LogonTokenCacheExpirationWindow = New-TimeSpan -Minutes 5 
   $tokenservice.Update()
   

   3. force timeouts in a SharePoint intranet site using the Master page
      Ref link: https://slightlybehindthecurve.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/how-to-force-timeouts-in-a-sharepoint-intranet-site-when-using-windows-authentication/
   4. Session timeout in Web.config file
      We are unable to achieve expected idle session timeout functionality Using the above methods

I am looking for your expertise to support this.

Answer 1

Hi @Muthuraman Ramasamy , thank you for posting in the Q&A forum.

After enabling and setting Idle Session timeout via Central Administration / using PowerShell / in Web.config file, you can write your custom function in a custom master page in the SharePoint root site collection. A sample can be found here: Sharepoint timeout.
Once you finish building the custom mater page in root site collection, you can apply it to all site collections in this web application using PowerShell, referring to this post.

Another reference of JQuery Show Session Timeout message before session expires in asp.net.

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Answer 2

If using Windows claims, then you cannot have an "idle" timeout as sessions are not persistent to begin with.