2 min readManage Out of Office or Automatic Reply in Office 365

Emails has become a powerful medium for communication. It’s obvious that
the sender of the email expects a reply from the recipient and this is
very critical from the business point of view. So every user has to
inform his / her non availability to the sender of the email in case a
prompt reply is not possible. Finally, it is in the shoulders of the
Admin to set / manage Out of Office (OOO) messages for users who has
missed to set or to maintain a standard template for all users as per
business policy.

This can be achieved in Office 365 by below methods:

1. By Exchange Transport Rules (ETR)
2. By PowerShell

1. Create and name a new ETR Policy and select the recipient to whom
   
   you want to apply the OOO message.
2. Set condition as ‘Reject the message with the Explanation’ and add
   
   the OOO message that needs to send to the sender of the email.
3. Set rule activation and deactivation dates and save the rule.

Below is the sample OOO message that appears to the sender of the
email.

Method 2: By PowerShell

First we need to find the users who have set ‘Out of Office’ in their
calendars and apply the message template for them.

Execute the below cmdlet to get the OOO message enabled users along
with the Date and the messages set.

                        Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration | Where {$_.AutoReplyState -eq "Scheduled" -or $_.AutoReplyState -eq "Enabled"} | Format-List MailboxOwnerId, StartTime, EndTime, InternalMessage, ExternalMessage

Now you can set the standard message for users who has set OOO messages.

                        Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -Identity mike -AutoReplyState scheduled -InternalMessage "I am out of the office" -ExternalMessage "I am out of the office"

Note: To set the message to all users you can remove the parameter
‘Identity’.

Below are the drawbacks in both the methods:

1. ETR is not the viable solution as the auto reply message does not
   
   indicates the purpose as “Out of Office’.
2. The PowerShell cmdlets has to be executed manually each time and
   
   there is no centralized system and scope for automation.
3. When Admin sets the OOO message for another user who has forget to
   
   set the dates in his calendar, by default it will set the activation
   
   and deactivation date is set as 1 day.
4. You cannot set recurring OOO message for users.
5. Office 365 will send only 1 OOO message per sender. This may not
   
   workout in case of a user who is on long vacation.
6. Not able to format the messages easily as HTML editor is not
   
   available in Office 365.

By using GingerEx for Office 365 email signature you can able to
overcome the above hurdles and manage the OOO messages for your users
easily from a central system.

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