Hi- can workflow integrate with Outlook to send an out-of-office email notification to a specified user(s) when someone has the auto-reply activated on their Outlook account?
Not quite, but yes.
Outlook is a client-side application, so no, Workflow can't integrate with that. But, out-of-office settings are saved in Exchange, Outlook is just how you interact with the mail server.
Workflow can configure automatic replies in Microsoft Exchange, but it would need to know when the user is on vacation. It can't detect actions in Outlook/Exchange. So you would need either to have the user submit a form to indicate when they're on vacation or start a business process with that information. Or if you have the information in an outside database, Workflow could start on a schedule and read it from there.
It sounds like you are asking if Workflow can be aware of a specific user's out of office status in Exchange/Outlook.
I like the idea. We should probably enumerate some useful cases for Laserfiche to be able to add a features.
For example, could a particular party (initiator, person to finish a Wait activity, etc) or group be notified if one or more of the participants in a Business Process have their out of office set in exchange?
Or, if an email activity sends an email to someone with their out of office enabled, could workflow send another email to the same recipients (or an additional recipient) informing them that someone is out of the office?
Even better, maybe a new token can be used to check the out of office state of a list of users in Exchange. This token can be used to create a new branch of activities for handling out of office situations.
I hope this makes sense and can be useful for creating a new feature in Workflow.
Hi Kenny,
All of the possible user cases you mentioned would be great features to use if materialized as added features in workflow. Especially your last suggestion of a token monitoring the list of users with the out of office flag would enable workflow to systematically move the process forward without user intervention.