How do I implement an out of office reply?

To create an automated Out of Office reply, you would need to create a template which contains required content for the reply, and define an automatic reply policy.

When defining the automatic reply policy, you should set conditions and exceptions to determine the circumstances under which the Out of Office reply will be sent. For example, you might define a policy that is triggered for all Active Directory contacts with exceptions for a technical support group. To trigger the policy only at weekends, you would use the advanced schedule from the date range tab:

It is important to note that Exclaimer Auto Responder does not affect any Out of Office settings that users may set locally, using Microsoft Outlook. If you define an Auto Responder policy to send an Out of Office reply for a given user and that user has set their own Out of Office reply using Microsoft Outlook, the recipient would receive both replies. If you are using Auto Responder to manage Out of Office replies, you should advise users not to define local Out of Office settings in Outlook.