How to deal with mass out of office / company closure

We have a 4 day weekend coming up soon and it has been suggested that all turn out of office assistant on to ensure all customers are aware we are closed.

Due to end user reliability and stupidity i have been requested to come up with a way to set all of them.

Is there a way to make a transport rule do this? instead of the actual out-of-office assistant. an reply-to-all emails function would do the job, with a global company message.

or a way to set out of office via exchange, without having to administer all user accounts.

Running SBS 2011 - Exchange 2010

Thank you

Solution 1:

You should avoid these situations , as you will be the only one responsable ....

To accomplish this please see this guide http://www.vmadmin.co.uk/microsoft/55-msex2010/258-ex2010mailboxautoreplyconfiguration . I would go with the creation of a script in order to automate (out-of-office and back state ) . I would create and array containing all the users of my email accounts and go after with an for each statement (element in the array ).

At worst you could make a variable for the account name and request input from the person who runs the script (you ) - $uservariable Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration -identity $uservariable/"andy barnes"/ -AutoReplyState enabled -EndTime 03/08/2010 -InternalMessage "I am currently out of the office on until Tuesday 4rd August due to partying and so forth. Please could all enquiries be directed to ext 123 and emails be sent to [email protected]" -ExternalMessage "I am currently out of the office on until Tuesday 4rd August. Please could all enquiries be directed to ext 123 and emails be sent to [email protected]"

Hope this helps .