With absentify’s out-of-office reply feature, HR admins can centrally manage and configure automated out-of-office messages for employees. This feature ensures clear, consistent communication for all scheduled absences by applying templates directly in employees’ Outlook settings.
Note: In the Plus Plan, administrators can set and manage templates for all employees. In other plans, employees configure their out-of-office replies individually. See the employee guide here.

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Benefits of centralized management

  • Consistency: Ensures uniform communication for all employees.
  • Control: Admins can restrict employees from editing templates to maintain a professional tone.
  • Automation: Templates are applied automatically during scheduled absences and disabled when the absence ends.
  • Customization: Use placeholders to personalize replies for employees while maintaining a standard format.
Important: While absentify sets out-of-office replies in Outlook, employees can still manually change or disable these settings directly in Outlook. absentify cannot override such manual changes.

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Prerequisites

  1. Plus Plan: This feature is only available in the Plus Plan.
  2. Microsoft Tenant Admin Rights: To activate this feature, refer to the Outlook out-of-office permissions guide.
absentify uses the Microsoft Graph API with the Mail.ReadWrite permission. This permission is solely used to configure out-of-office replies; no other mailbox data is accessed or stored.

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Configuring automatic out-of-office replies

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Step 1: Access out-of-office settings

  1. Log into absentify and navigate to Settings > Integrations > Outlook out-of-office.
  2. Click Configuration.

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Step 2: Select users and leave types

  1. Select the employees for whom you want to configure out-of-office replies.
    • All selected employees will share the same template for the chosen leave type.
  2. Choose the leave type to associate with the out-of-office template.
    • Additional templates can be created for other leave types.

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Step 3: Create the template

  1. Write the internal and external out-of-office messages. You can use placeholders to dynamically insert details:
    • Basic placeholders:
      • {{startDate}}: Start date of the leave.
      • {{startTime}}: Start time of the leave.
      • {{dateOfReturn}}: Return date.
      • {{timeOfReturn}}: Return time.
      • {{name}}: Employee’s full name.
    • Approver placeholders:
      • {{approverName}}: Name of the manager who approved the leave.
      • {{approverMail}}: Email address of the approving manager.
      • For specific approvers: Use {{approverName[1]}}, {{approverMail[1]}}, etc., to target individual approvers in sequence.
Placeholders are automatically replaced with absence-specific details when the message is applied.

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Step 4: Preview and test the message

  1. Use the Preview option to review the message.
  2. Click Send test email to see how the message appears in an inbox.

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Step 5: Configure external replies

  1. Enable replies for external contacts by selecting Send replies outside your organization.
  2. Limit replies to contacts only by selecting Send replies only to contacts.

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Step 6: Allow or restrict employee customization

  1. Decide if employees can customize their out-of-office messages:
    • Enable customization by selecting the checkbox.
    • Restrict customization to enforce the admin-defined template.

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Troubleshooting

  • Undeliverable replies: If absentify cannot set an out-of-office reply, the employee will receive an email to configure it manually. Admins are also notified of these issues.
  • Manual changes: If employees modify or disable the reply directly in Outlook, absentify cannot automatically reapply it until the next absence.