5

We have a 4 day weekend coming up soon and it has been suggested that all turn out of office assistant on to ensure all customers are aware we are closed.

Due to end user reliability and stupidity i have been requested to come up with a way to set all of them.

Is there a way to make a transport rule do this? instead of the actual out-of-office assistant. an reply-to-all emails function would do the job, with a global company message.

or a way to set out of office via exchange, without having to administer all user accounts.

Running SBS 2011 - Exchange 2010

Thank you

user121246
  • 291
  • 1
  • 4
  • 14

1 Answers1

1

You should avoid these situations , as you will be the only one responsable ....

To accomplish this please see this guide http://www.vmadmin.co.uk/microsoft/55-msex2010/258-ex2010mailboxautoreplyconfiguration . I would go with the creation of a script in order to automate (out-of-office and back state ) . I would create and array containing all the users of my email accounts and go after with an for each statement (element in the array ).

At worst you could make a variable for the account name and request input from the person who runs the script (you ) - $uservariable Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -identity $uservariable/"andy barnes"/ -AutoReplyState enabled -EndTime 03/08/2010 -InternalMessage "I am currently out of the office on until Tuesday 4rd August due to partying and so forth. Please could all enquiries be directed to ext 123 and emails be sent to somewhere@domain.local" -ExternalMessage "I am currently out of the office on until Tuesday 4rd August. Please could all enquiries be directed to ext 123 and emails be sent to somewhere@domain.local"

Hope this helps .

Alex H
  • 1,814
  • 11
  • 18
  • Okay so would a rule to just reply to all emails received within the whole organisation be easier?(and possible?!?) as i dont wish to be firing scripts into the shell all of friday and wednesday! – user121246 May 29 '12 at 09:09
  • If you create them with the string array ( containing all the users from your company ) you won't be firing scripts all day . Just once for out-of-office and a second time to set them back :) . The last example is in case you won't chose to take the path with the array and for statement , and it's still faster than changing them "manually" from the gui. – Alex H May 29 '12 at 09:12
  • thanks for offering your assistance, i have decided to pass on this and let the monkeys do it themselves. thank you – user121246 May 29 '12 at 13:46
  • There are cases where setting an out of office for a group of people is acceptable. For instance, we had an environment that hosted a subdomain with mailboxes. We got rid of the subdomain and pulled the mailboxes into the root domain. We wanted to keep the old mailboxes out there for a time with an auto-reply so that people sending mail incorrectly would get the message, much like a page is moved site that redirects after 3 seconds that you eventually get rid of. – Snowburnt Oct 01 '13 at 13:07