We were in the process of trying to figure out just what was going on with the OOF feature in Exchange/Outlook as no automatic replies were being sent out at all.
We ran through a number of different steps in the process and eventually came to the conclusion that something was catching them in ExchangeDefender (XD).
Well, since we have been so busy one of the To Do list items on our own end did not get addressed. That is fixing the RSS setup between IE and Outlook on our own systems. Thus we missed the following XD posts:
If we had been paying attention to the XD blog we would have seen the following as noted in the above posts:
Almost all of our clients do not use OOF, nor do we, so to date we had not encountered a “problem” with them not being sent out.
Long story short, use outbound-jr.exchangedefender.com for the Smart Host setting in SBS/Exchange if there is a need to utilize these types of features.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
How do you not use OOF? Any time I'm away from e-mail for more than 30 minutes I set my OOF so people know why I'm not getting back to them.
ReplyDeleteSean,
ReplyDeleteOne of the first conversation topics we have with prospects has to do with how we priortize our support requests.
Business Critical: 1.
Business Impact @ User: 2
General Impact: 3
General: 4
A part of that conversation are the tier levels we have in place.
Our contract clients with time blocks get 4 hour response times, contract clients get 4-8 hour response times, while break/fix gets 24 hour response times.
Anyone requiring immediate attention on any non-contract/non-time block setup understands that we bill accordingly (we don't do break/fix much anymore).
All of our key clients know how to get in touch if there is an emergency and know that they will get immediate attention.
Thus, OOF is not really a part of our need.
Philip
Awesome tip Philip. We use XD and didn't realize outbound-jr existed. That is quite useful for us for OOF.
ReplyDeleteHeya Philip,
ReplyDeleteAlot of people got caught with that - At the time I was scratched my head and I covered it in the UKSBSG mailing list, didn't think to punt it to the other side of the Atlantic...
All clients now use -jr as delivery and read reciepts are used habitually by too many people... And for me, delivery reciepts are diagnostic tools :-)