Excellent new Out of Office feature in Exchange 2007

Posted by Mike Snyder on January 16, 2007  |  Comments (1)

I noticed the other day that Microsoft RTM'd (Released to Manufacturing) Exchange Server 2007 and it is available for download on MSDN. I decided to spend a few minutes researching exactly what's new in Exchange 2007. There are tons of new features of course, but one that is near and dear to my heart is an improvement to the Out of Office Assistant.

In Exchange 2003 you have to manually turn your out of office email message on and off. The problem is that I was always running out the door to a meeting so I would forget to turn on the Out of Office message!

In addition, Exchange 2003 will deliver the same out of office message to every single person.  I would like to let my co-workers see a response like "Hey I am at Client XYZ but call my cell with any emergencies" but I want external users to see a message like "I will be out of the office today, please contact customer support with any questions".

I tried several times to build a custom rule in Outlook to solve these problems but I could never get it working just right. Now with Exchange 2007, those two features come out of the box with a new and improved Out of Office Assistant! You can see that you can schedule to turn on/off your Out of Office replies plus you can specify two different messages (inside and outside your organization).
 

Now I just need to work with our internal IT guys to figure out when we can make some time to upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 so we can start taking advantage of this.