I thought that I would take a break from KVS for a little while and blog about a neat little trick that I came across the other day.

Essentially my organisation has over 4000 mail users, which over periods of time a number of them can either go on long term sick, maternity leave, annual leave etc, and one of the most common things that they forget to do is set their Out of Office assistant.

My boss came over to me the other day and said “is there an easy way to configure the Out of Office without having to physically logon to the mailbox?”.

I thought about it, and then did a little research and came up with the following script: (Edit – found some problems – updated)

Set objMAPISession = CreateObject(“MAPI.Session”)

strExchangeSvr = InputBox(“Please provide the name of your Exchange Server”)
strMailbox = InputBox(“Please provide the name of the Mailbox that you wish to set OOO”)

strMAPI = strExchangeSvr & vbLf & strMailbox

On error Resume Next

objMAPISession.Logon “”, “”, False, True, 0, False, strMAPI

If err <> 0 Then
Wscript.Echo “An Error occured: ” & err.description
Err.clear
Wscript.Sleep 7000
Wscript.Quit
End If

strOOOMessage = InputBox(“Please type in the OOO message for this user”)

objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText = strOOOMessage
objMAPISession.OutOfOffice = 1
strOOOMessage = objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText

objMAPISession.Logoff
Set objMAPISession = Nothing

Essentially all you need to do is copy this script onto your Exchange server (although you need to ensure that the account that you are logged on with has rights to the mailboxes – permissions similar to EXMERGE are good) and then run the script.

You will be asked for the Exchange Server name, the Mailbox alias and the Out of Office message that you would like to set – voila!