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: This feature is only available in the Plus Plan, allowing administrators to 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 user management

  1. Log into absentify and navigate to Settings > Users.
  2. Select the employees for whom you want to manage out-of-office templates.
  3. Click Bulk edit and choose Manage out of office notifications.

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Step 2: Select leave types

  1. Select the leave type or multiple leave types you want to associate with an out-of-office template. All selected employees will share the same template for the chosen leave type(s).
  2. Continue to template configuration.

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Step 3: Create the template

Write the internal and, optionally, external out-of-office messages. You can use dynamic placeholders to automatically insert absence-specific details into each message as soon as the leave request is active.
  • 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
    • {{firstName}}: Employee’s first name
    • {{lastName}}: Employee’s last name
  • Approver placeholders:
    • {{approverName}} and {{approverMail}}: Displays the name and email of the last approver in the configured sequence.
    • Specific approvers: Use placeholders like {{approverName[1]}}, {{approverMail[1]}}, {{approverName[2]}}, etc., to specify individual approvers. For instance:
      • {{approverName[1]}} and {{approverMail[1]}} display the first approver’s information.
      • {{approverName[2]}} and {{approverMail[2]}} display the second approver, and so forth.
Approvers are listed in the order configured by the administrator. If no approver data exists, the placeholder will default to an empty string.
  • Representative placeholders:
    These placeholders are only available when the selected leave type requires an assigned representative. Learn more about this setting in the representative requirement guide.
    • {{representativeName}}: Name of the assigned representative
    • {{representativeEmail}}: Email address of the assigned representative

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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:
    • Check the box if employees are allowed to make adjustments. Send them this guide for more information on the setup.
    • Restrict customization to enforce the admin-defined template.
Deactivating this setting does not prevent the employee from changing their out-of-office message directly in their Outlook settings.

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Troubleshooting

  • Manual changes in Outlook:
    If an employee manually modifies or disables the out-of-office reply directly in Outlook, absentify cannot reapply the template until the next approved absence. Any changes made outside of absentify override the automated configuration.
  • Unable to set automatic reply:
    If absentify is unable to apply the out-of-office reply in Outlook, the affected employee will receive an email with instructions to configure it manually. Administrators will also be notified of the failed attempt.
  • Out-of-office messages not being sent:
    It’s important to note that absentify does not send out-of-office messages itself — it only sets up the automatic replies within the selected user’s Outlook account.     If an out-of-office message is not being sent from a user’s account, follow these steps to investigate:
    1. Go to Settings > Microsoft > View sync logs, or access them directly via the Microsoft sync logs.
    2. Locate the sync log for the specific user and date when the leave request was approved.
    3. If the log shows “successful”, this confirms that absentify successfully updated the user’s automatic reply settings in Outlook.
    4. In this case, the issue lies within the user’s Outlook environment and should be escalated internally (e.g. to your Microsoft 365 administrator), as absentify has no direct control over Outlook’s message delivery.