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  • #2148517

    Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

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    by fingerlickingood_ ·

    Hey Folks,

    I’m new here looking to find out if my recent brainstorming is feasible and if so, how hard it would be.

    What i’m looking to do is have an out of office reply that is automatically turned on at a specific time of day on Friday, and then turned off at a specific time of day on Monday.

    I understand that outlook has command line switches including: “/autorun macroname” which run’s a specific macro. In turn obviously, outlook gives the ability to create macro’s.

    It’s my assumption that a person could write a batch file to run at a specific time that in turn runs the macro that turns on the out of office reply. Then similarly, at a later point the batch file would prompt the macro that turns off the out of office message.

    My issues/questions are I don’t know anything about VB scripting nor VB scripting in outlook. Is such a task feasible? Would it require a large amount of work to write the macro? I think the batch file would be simple enough to write.

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    • #2457227

      Clarifications

      by fingerlickingood_ ·

      In reply to Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

      Clarifications

    • #2457106

      Most of the working world goes home on a Friday evening …

      by older mycroft ·

      In reply to Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

      Returning on the following Monday morning.

      So, who would this magical macro be aimed at?

      I think 52 Out-of-Office replies per year would soon p!ss folk off! And also paint you as a bit of an idiot! 😉

      • #2456823

        Most of the working world goes home on a Friday evening …

        by fingerlickingood_ ·

        In reply to Most of the working world goes home on a Friday evening …

        Macro would be used by the service desk of a large company. As you mentioned much of the working world goes home on a friday evening, however, there are a bunch that work through the weekend and still require support.

        This macro would turn on an out of office reply to the service desk’s email address and the folks working through the weekend that emails the service desk would get a reply letting them know there’s no one there to look at their email as we’re only open on these days between these hours. If their issue is urgent, contact the oncall folks via phone.

        People would only get an out of office reply if they emailed us, if they don’t, then they’ll never know anything even changed.

        • #2456799

          Service Desk that only works a 5-day week ?…

          by older mycroft ·

          In reply to Most of the working world goes home on a Friday evening …

          That sounds like the kind of Service Desk that would feature in a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon!

          “[i]folks working through the weekend that emails the service desk would get a reply letting them know there’s no one there to look at their email as we’re only open on these days between these hours. [b][u]If their issue is urgent,[/u] contact the oncall folks via phone.[/b][/i]

          So, let me get this right now: You are [b]SO SERVICE ORIENTED[/b] that you’re gonna set up a system whereby anyone in distress will get what amounts to a ‘BOUNCE’ that tells them there’s no-one there! Then lists a telephone number to call in case of emergency!

          If you consider yourself so service oriented you should organise a BLANKET EMAIL that is sent out to every service client BEFORE they find themselves in difficulty.

          That way they won’t be wasting their time emailing someone who’s not available and suffering downtime waiting for an out-of-office-reply that might not arrive instantly – some of them arrive hours later!

          By the way, while you [b][u]are[/b][/u] available during the week, what percentage of your emails do you consider to be [i]not urgent[/i]?

          Now I remember why I went SOLO. Thanks for that! 😉

        • #2458428

          Service Desk that only works a 5-day week ?…

          by fingerlickingood_ ·

          In reply to Service Desk that only works a 5-day week ?…

          IT including the service desk provide services to meet the business’ requirements. I’m not here to question the business’s requirements, but thanks anyways for your input.

          If anyone has some input to the actual technical question at hand and not the process’s surround it, I’d appreciate that.

          Thanks

      • #2458965

        What’s the Big Deal

        by l-mo ·

        In reply to Most of the working world goes home on a Friday evening …

        To much stink for nothing, i think. We should focus on the question at hand.

        This type of automation does come in handing for some. I work in a law firm with multiple locations in and out of the US. They have over 100 employees working at anytime on the road and you never know when they’ll need support. We have 24 hour support but ,obviously, we rotate staff. All support staff are required to set an out of office reply when they’re not working; just in case someone e-mails you directly and not the HelpDesk.

        It would be interesting to see if any does have a solution. I agree, get off his case and look at the question at hand.

        • #2458955

          A rotational-staff-rota solves the problem ….

          by older mycroft ·

          In reply to What’s the Big Deal

          That is an end to the problem.

          [u]Afterthought:[/u]
          When MY phone rings – I answer it!

          [i]I don’t check which day of the week it is first![/i]

    • #2566805

      Just a thought

      by sean ·

      In reply to Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

      So rather than actually doing this through Outlook, maybe what you could do is enable the OOO and see what regkey it changes, export that and then just set a scheduled task to run that key every Friday afternoon, with the undo regkey run every Monday morning. I havent looked to see what key it changes specifically but I am sure it will probably just be a DWORD.

      Just a thought…. hope you find an answer that works for you rather than having to deal with the unhelpful and judgemental comments.

      Sean

    • #2566710

      Create a Rule

      by ic-it ·

      In reply to Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

      Or try this freeware(?)

      http://www.sharewareconnection.com/desktopresponder.htm

      To create a rule use these parameters.
      Set the rule to kick in on a —-
      message to you
      within a specified date/time
      send a template

      You can create a “user template” with the message you desire.

    • #2568029

      script or VB executable

      by rkapl ·

      In reply to Turn an out of office reply on/off automatically

      Hi!

      Try this (executable): http://officegoodies.wiki.sourceforge.net/OOFautomation

      or this (script): http://www.codeproject.com/KB/exchange/OOF_Automation.aspx

      Both should run on a server as they should be activated regularly (to check whether there are people “out of the office”.

      The “out of the office” status is set by entering an “away” status appointment in your exchange/outlook calendar. If the recurringly running script/exe detects such an appointment for a user, it sets the predefined OOF template message to reflect the date(s) and/or time(s) to the away appointments date/time.

      -hope that helps,
      Roland

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