Out of Office Messages

The outOfOfficeEnabled and outofOfficeMessage account attributes can be used to enable the out of office autoreply function and set the out-of-office message, respectively. These can be used for Exchange 2000 or 2003 accounts. These attributes are only set on account updates and not account creates.

The adapter requires that the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) be installed on the gateway machine. There are at least two ways to install the MAPI subsystem. The simplest way is to install the Microsoft Outlook client on the gateway machine. No other configuration is necessary.

Another way is to install the Exchange System Management Tools, which are located on the Exchange Server CD. The management tools are installed as a component of the normal Exchange Server install. However, this installs the MAPI subsystem files, but it does not complete the configuration.

The mapisvc.inf file (typically located in c:\winnt\system32) contains the available MAPI services, and it must be updated to include the Exchange message service entries. The msems.inf file, which is contained in the gateway zip file, contains the entries that need to be merged into the mapisvc.inf file to configure the Exchange message server. The msems.inf file can be merged into the mapisvc.inf file manually using a text file editor such as notepad. Alternatively, a tool named MergeIni.exe is available on the Microsoft Platform SDK and can be found in the Windows Core SDK in the Microsoft SDK\Bin directory.

Use the following command to run MergeIni:

MergeIni msems.inf -m

Out of Office attributes cannot be retrieved when the msExchHideFromAddressLists attribute is enabled. If a user form attempts to display the Out of Office attributes when msExchHideFromAddressLists is true, the values will be undefined. The sample Active Directory user form contains logic that prevents Waveset from displaying Out of Office attrbutes when msExchHideFromAddressLists is enabled.

Exchange Server 2007 does not support setting the Out Of Office message for a user. The messages are no longer stored as part of the user entry and form a part of the user’s mailbox. Outlook or Outlook Web Access should be used by the end user to manage the Out of Office replies.