How can we get accurate "out of office" information for our users into Service Manager?

[Berto2002]

Like most people, we use Microsoft exchange and someone's mailbox only sends an out of office notifications once to any given address. So if we email a user from a ticket, the first update gets an out of office response on our timeline but if we need them to respond on more than one ticket then that other ticket doesn't get their out of office response. Not knowing when a user is out of the office is really inconvenient.

What solutions have people put in place to detect and use the end-user "out of office" status and what solutions does the Hornbill product have for this?

The Nirvana is for us to be able to capture exactly when the user turns on their out of office - and turns it off - and have that available to the BPM as a status to interact with with expressions and the like.

The best option I have in my head so far is to run a script against all mailboxes on an interval and add any that are out of office to an azure group (and remove when they turn it off) and because we can synchronise azure active directory groups into service manager, we can theoretically detect if somebody is out of office. But this involves a lot of scripts scanning and importing quite regularly and therefore won't be real time. It also doesn't tell us when they are out of office until.

Any comments helpful please.

[Keith Stevenson]

Berto

The below is a snippet of code that will reset all Out of Office every time its run (so next email will get reply) for all users.. This if scheduled sort of resolves yours issue periodically. However if you use Hornbill ITOM and on receiving an Out of Office message log a call, this can then fire an ITOM job\script which is a variation of the bellow to reset that users (as you have their email) out of office status in realtime so next time you email from this or another call it will get the OOO reply, the call then done can auto close itself

[code]
$enabled = Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.AutoReplyState -eq "Enabled"} | Select-Object Identity, AutoReplyState
$enabled | ForEach-Object {

Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $_.Identity -AutoReplyState "Disabled"
set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration $_.identity -AutoReplyState $_.AutoReplyState
}

[/code]

ITOM solves all the problems and there would be other options available (including grabbing the Out of Office status and updating the Hornbill record either via script or future package) should you choose that route

Kind Regards

Hornbill Cloud Team 

[Steve Giller]

Currently ITOM does not sync the Hornbill Status to Microsoft Out Of Office status but this could be achieved.

You would need at least a basic ITOM subscription for this integration.