Out Of Office in Hannover and Domino “Next”

Reading through some of the slides for
the sessions that I didn’t get to go to at Lotusphere this year I came
across some interesting information about the Out Of Office agent in the
next version of Lotus Domino "Next" / Hannover that hasn’t been
reported in any of the blogs yet.

The new OOO will no longer be an agent
but a server-side service. This means that there are a number of new features
that I know that a lot of users have been asking for in the past.

The first feature is the ‘instant reply’.
Because it is a server-side service the OOO is triggered when an email
is deposited into the users mailfile. This also allows for failover in
a clustered environment if the primary server is down then the mail gets
delivered on the secondary server and the OOO is triggered there.

The new OOO will allow for periods of
time that are LESS then one day.  If your only going to be out of
the office for a halfday you will be able to specify this in the OOO profile.

You can select if you want to only send
one reply to a sender ( as it is now ) or if you want to reply to all emails
from a sender, handy if your out of the office for an extended time and
somebody who sent you an email last week has forgotten about your earlier
OOO reply.

And finally the new OOO will also disable
itself when the time period has expired. No more messages everyday reminding
you to turn it off.