I believe this is not possible using just the Out of Office Assistant. This was done to stop infinite OOO message loops, bringing Exchange servers to their knees in the event of two people having OOO messages set, with a message being sent from one to the other.
It can be done however, using Message Rules, but this is not advisable (for the aforementioned reason).
UPDATE:
Ok, found a dirty hack that will allow you to do what you requested - however, it is a really dirty hack.
You'd need to customise the script for an individual user (if you have many users, they need one each). Place the script on the Exchange server, and Schedule the script to run once a day. The reason this works is because each time you re-enable the OOA, it wipes the list of people it has sent OOO messages to. You would of course need to remember to remove the script when the user returns to work, otherwise everyday it would re-enable their OOA.
Also, change line 3 and 4 for your environment, and the user in question.
Set objMAPISession = CreateObject(”MAPI.Session”)
strExchangeSvr = "svr-exch-01.yourdomain.loc"
strMailbox = "jane.doe"
strMAPI = strExchangeSvr & vbLf & strMailbox
On error Resume Next
objMAPISession.Logon “”, “”, False, True, 0, False, strMAPI
If err <> 0 Then
Wscript.Echo “An Error occured: ” & err.description
Err.clear
Wscript.Sleep 7000
Wscript.Quit
End If
strOOOMessage = "Jane is having babies and will be absent for a while. Please try again after October. Ciao"
objMAPISession.OutOfOffice = False
objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText = strOOOMessage
objMAPISession.OutOfOffice = True
strOOOMessage = objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText
objMAPISession.Logoff
Set objMAPISession = Nothing
Please note: I have not tested this. You will need to deploy it with a test Mailbox, and do some testing with it.
Wow, I need a shower after that.
Try checking Help > Disabled Items
, and if the Out Of Office Assistant is in the list, enable it.
Also try looking at Tools > Trust Center > Add-ins
at the bottom of the screen choose Manage 'Exchange Client Extensions' and click 'Go'. Make sure that 'Exchange Extensions commands' and 'Exchange Extensions property pages' are ticked.
If not, try running Help > Office Diagnostics
If your outex2.ecf file is missing Office Diagnostics should offer to reinstall it.
Best Answer
I dont know of a server side solution, and while that would definately be best
Assuming that you can access a workstation with the user's Outlook remotely, you could use a freeware utility called GhostMouse, along with Windows task scheduler, to do this.
Record a "script" in GhostMouse, where mouse movements and clicks get recorded to a file. Precisely record this script such that you 1) minimize all Windows, 2) open Outlook, 3) take the necessary menu actions to disable and re-enable Out-Of-Office, 4) close Outlook.
Use Task Scheduler to schedule this script file to run automatically on a daily basis.
Again this is a client-side solution but is cheap and will probably work fine.
Just found this if you want to try it, I have not Out of office extender