RE: Almost OT: Outlook Automation

["Steve Morgan" <steve@xxxxxxx>]

Rob,

You can certainly enable the out-of-office notification in Exchange
programmatically. I can't remember exactly what the setting is but I'll
try to find out. One of our systems handles user administration - when
you delete a user from the 'organisation', rather than deleting the
Exchange mailbox we turn on the out-of-office notification and disable
the account. One thing you'll need to do is have a user that has admin
access to the mailboxes - you can grant this at the site level.

Note that do to it programmatically, you do it in Exchange, not Outlook.
This actually makes it easier, because you can do it from anywhere on
the network.

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Mouser [mailto:rmouser@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 25 June 2003 09:38
To: Ukha
Subject: [ukha_d] Almost OT: Outlook Automation

OK. This one is a little odd. We use Outlook (Linked to Exchange.)
heavily in our organisation. But we have a problem.  A little story....
Yesterday one of my Managers drove all the way to Watford (A fair few
hours from here!) to interview some candidates set up by an agency. The
problem came when the agency had emailed our HR administrator to say
that all candidates had cancelled! BUT, she was off sick and had not
opened her mail. My manager was an un-happy bunny as you can imagine!
So.......
Is it possible to control Outlook remotely/automatically? What I was
thinking was two possible solutions;
1)      The "out of office assistant" turned on automatically at
the end
of each day. Only turned off when the user sits at his/her desk and
turns it off.
2)      We could turn it on or forward a users email based on an event.
I.e. Off Sick, Holiday. If we could automate this even better. These
events are already logged in our internal systems SQL/VB so if an action
was automated based on an event. EVEN BETTER.
Or is their another solution? I would really like to automate it. Human
intervention always seems to lead to errors!
OK, so its not HA but it is UKWA and kinda relevant!
Many thanks
Rob