Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #10 Out of Office
OK, this one’s a bit of a cheat as it’s not really a cool new feature, more a case of “where on earth has it gone?”. Yes this one’s a bit like the big print button (you know that one that stares you in the face on the Print pane but first time in you spent ages looking for!), it’s right there on the backstage.
If you’ve got Outlook 2010 communicating to an Exchange 2003 environment, then your Out of Office will be a familiar pop-up where you can just enter your message. However if you’ve got Exchange 2010 then you get some additional options which are quite handy.
- First you can have different messages for internal recipients and external recipients. Handy when you want to provide extra contact information for employees of your firm on who to contact but which you may not want to pass onto the client.
- Also you can setup specific times for auto responses. So if you want to send auto responses only in business hours for example.
- You have the choice of using HTML in out of office replies, not sure why you’d want to but it’s there.
Hi Jason, pretty useful having an internal and external response, I use this a great deal. Just thought I’d point out for others these features have been in Exchange since 2007. You can also access these options through Outlook Web Access if you’re out and about or don’t have Outlook 2007 / 2010.