Martin Ryan wrote:Just a small request for when you take your well deserved holidays. I get all of the OLAPForums mail forwarded onto my personal email address to monitor it. 90% of that is out of office replies!
When you set up your out of office rules, can you please ignore emails from olapforums at gmail dot com
I'm betting one of those was from me last week. (I have to cram in 5 days of work into the 3 that I'm here because although the budget and end of year stuff has absolute priority... so does reducing my leave balance. Or so I'm told. Of course, I have about 6 days worth of stuff that I have to do AWAY from work in the 4 days of the week that I'm not here, which is why I also haven't had time to write much for the OLAPedia lately. (Or post here very often.) So if I had weeks which consisted of 11 or 12 days each, I'd be laughing. 13 or 14 day weeks would be even better since then I'd have time for some sleep as well. But I digress.)
Anyway, unfortunately I don't think that Outlook /Exchange users can comply. I tried something which I hoped would work... but tests showed that it didn't. I've since done a search on Usenet postings and found that there is in fact no (practical) way to do this. And it's not for want of lots and lots of people asking for it.
Further reading through Outlook documentation and manuals showed why; this is in fact an Exchange Server function rather than an Outlook one. It's only triggered from Outlook. In one way that's good in that it will still work even if you don't have Outlook (or your PC) running while you're away. In another way, it's not because it means that the Outlook user has far less control over the operation; Exchange is told to either send a message, or not.
Apparently the original intention of the Out Of Office assistant was to notify internal recipients only; the Exchange administrator can in fact switch it off for any e-mail coming in from outside the user's own domain. However considering that customers, suppliers and some other people have a need to know when someone is away, my bet is that there are very few Exchange servers where that is done.
Given the fact that you can pass the out of office message that you want sent to the Exchange Server, it might be thought that it would be a fairly trivial task for MS to reprogram it so that you can ALSO pass either a list of addresses or, better still, a mailing list of people that you want excluded (or included? why not?) for the Out Of Office notice.
But hey, I can understand why you can't pass a mailing list. Have you ever TRIED creating mailing lists in Outlook using VBA? If you have, you'll know what I mean. If you haven't, find someone who has, note the holes that they've kicked in the nearest wall and the fist marks on their monitors, and you'll know what I mean.
Put another way, it's yet another example of utterly boneheaded programming on the part of Microsoft. The Outlook / Exchange team manages to excel in this field. (See also "creating mailing lists in VBA" above, as well as the fact that you can no longer automate sending an e-mail without user intervention without resorting to a hack.) About the only thing they did right with this feature is making sure that it sends to any given recipient only once.
And this is also why you can't really replace the Out of Office assistant with Rules. (No, not TM1 Rules, Outlook rules which are much flakier than TM1 rules with or without conditional feeders.) Short of doing some serious VBA ju-ju, you couldn't ensure that an Outlook rule would send the Out of Office notice to an individual only once.
And the consequences of neglecting to prevent a rule from sending an out of office message when it receives a "delivery failed" notice don't bear thinking about. ("Endless loop" is a clue.)
Not that it matters anyway, because using a rule would only work if your Outlook application and PC were running.
"Out of Office"... could have been great, but ended up being just another ill thought out MS screw-up.
But unfortunately it's a screw-up which is a necessary evil.
