Forum Discussion
Kaushal-Mehta
Microsoft
MicrosoftPreview exited, now GA: Out of Office Scheduling
Description
Set up a message to let others know you're on vacation or not available to reply. Your out of office status will also sync with your Outlook calendar, your presence and contact card information.
Flighting status
Rolling out this week on Desktop and Web.
How to enable
Two ways to access the Out of Office feature
1) Through "Profile"
Click profile then Set status message
Click Schedule out of office
2) Through "Settings"
Click Settings
General -> Out of Office -> Schedule
Now, from within the Scheduler
Include an Out of Office message
Note – Text is required to be compatible with Outlook scheduling.
Click Save
Options
Send replies outside my organization
Include text to auto reply
Send replies only during a time period
Pick dates and times to begin and end the Out of office status message and presence state.
Outlook
You will be able to see your changes in Outlook as well as update them there.
How to Disable
- Change the Turn on automatic reply setting in Teams radio button to off and save
- Change the Send automatic replies setting in Outlook to off and save
Note: If you need information about enabling the public preview itself, see “Enable the public preview for Teams” below.
Microsoft 365 workloads and dependencies
|
Product, workload, or area |
Dependency (Yes/No) |
If yes, version requirements and other dependencies |
|
Exchange |
No |
|
|
Sharepoint, files |
No |
|
|
Skype for Business |
No |
|
|
Outlook add-in |
No |
|
|
Azure AD |
No |
|
|
OneDrive |
No |
|
|
Office |
No |
|
Supported clients and platforms
|
Windows 10 |
macOS |
iOS |
Android |
Linux |
Chrome |
Firefox |
Safari |
Edge |
Internet Explorer |
|
Yes |
Yes |
- |
- |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
- |
Known issues
None
Known limitations
As mentioned in the guide an Out of Office Message needs to be included for Teams to save the configuration and set your presence to Out of Office.
Enable your Teams client for the public preview
- First, IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on Show preview features. Learn how at Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.
- Users then choose to join the public preview individually. See Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com) for instructions.
Summary of public preview features
For a history of features in the Office and Teams public previews, see Release Notes Current Channel (Preview) - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs.
Send us your feedback
Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help > Give feedback.
Thank you,
Preview Team Jason Schumaker
Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams
I welcome this update, however it pre-supposes that everyone has a regular work pattern, like 9am-5pm. With many organisations offering flexible working, it inadvertently discriminates against those who have a non-standard pattern, who often tend to be women with caring responsibilities. Many people I work with have a recurring non-standard pattern, and would like to be able to set the out of office pattern once, and for it to come on automatically every day. I have to manually set it every day, which, over the course of a year adds up to lots of useful working time lost in this 'short' daily pointless task. Microsoft - please support all those with amended working patterns to stop wasting time setting this EVERY DAY. Thanks very much for your consideration and support.
- Jason_SchumacherI'll take this feedback to our feature team to consider for a future update.
In the meantime you might try this advanced scenario from Outlook. You could set up a reoccurring appointment and set your status as Out of Office. Teams will show you as OOF during those days and time. You could then pair it with the Set status message feature in Teams to alert others with more information.Jason_SchumacherThanks for the suggestion, I already set my status as out of office for the non-standard working pattern. However, I also want the out of office message to be sent during that time, for the many colleagues who still use Outlook and not Teams (I use both). Here are some example working patterns of co-workers:
07:45 - 16:00 Monday - Thursday, 07:45 - 11:45 Friday
07:30 - 17:00 Monday - Thursday, out of office Friday
09:00 - 17:00 Tuesday - Thursday
07:30 - 13:00 Monday - Friday
The council area that I am in has all schools finish at lunch time on a Friday (I know!) so many people work a condensed working pattern that has them off on Friday afternoons.
Instead of setting my out of office message every day, I want to put in my pattern and automatically have the message sent during my non-working hours, not just the status (already done). Thanks for considering this, which will be of benefit to carers everywhere.
- Am I right in thinking that you still need to enter the Teams status text and tick 'Show when people message me' so users are notified if they chat/message in Teams? That is this only shows if you check the user status.
- Jason_SchumacherThanks for asking.
You do not need to set the status text or the show when people message me options for the OOF feature to work. You only need to enable the controls and fields in the dedicated Schedule out of office feature.
Looks like this doesn't work with on-premises Exchange. Is that expected and the known issues should be updated?
- Agree with Andrew I can see my previous OOO message in Outlook but not in Teams. Also the entry screen is not responsive so on my laptop I could not see the save button
- Jason_Schumacher
This is great feedback Nikki. An update is in progress to address the text retention between Teams and Outlook.
Thank you for also highlighting your experience on your laptop. I was able to reproduce this and we are considering ways to update this form for better accessibility. To continue trying out the feature until an update is released you might try the Teams zoom setting as a temporary mitigation.
I just saw this today and it looks good. It would be nice if it pulled the current/previous message like Outlook does as we find people just update the date and reason each time rather than writing the message from scratch
- Jason_SchumacherThank you for the feedback Andrew. I'm happy to report that an update is in progress to address this.
