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Kaushal-Mehta's avatar
Kaushal-Mehta
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Mar 12, 2021

Preview 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 inf...
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_Sheila's avatar
_Sheila
Copper Contributor
Jun 03, 2021

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_Schumacher's avatar
Jason_Schumacher
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 03, 2021
I'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.
  • _Sheila's avatar
    _Sheila
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 04, 2021

    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.

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