With the prominence of email in the workplace today as a major means of communication, more and more important correspondence is sent strictly through email. What does this mean? This means that an email that sits in your inbox for two days because you are on vacation could potentially have disastrous consequences. This is why the Out of Office Assistant is more important than ever.

*Note: For this article, I will be dealing with the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Outlook 2003. If you don’t use Microsoft Outlook for your email, you should investigate what a similar function would be on your email client.

The Out of Office Assistant works very much like an Away Message in AOL Instant Messenger (IM) if you are familiar with that tool. Basically, you write a few lines of text that is automatically sent to anybody who emails you.

There is a very simple process to do this. First, go to Tools - Out of Office Assistant…. The following pop-up window should be displayed:

As shown above, there are two radio buttons at the top of the window. This toggles the Out of Office Assistant on and off. Important note: Make sure to turn this OFF when you are back in the office. You don’t want to leave this on for a week after you get back.

The “AutoReply” text box is where you type the message you want sent to people when they send you email. In the above screenshot, I have a basic message that I use and modify for each time I’m going to be away from the office. The critical pieces of information you need to provide in this message are the following:

1. The date range for which you will not be in the office.
2. The person to contact in your absence.
3. The subject matter that this contact person can answer questions on.

You should have more than one contact person if you need multiple people to cover multiple different subjects while you are away.

Once this message is crafted, all you have to do is click the “OK” button and your Out of Office Assistant will be turned on. You can also perform more complex functions using the “Add Rule…” button, where you can add rules for when you are away. This works just like creating normal rules in Microsoft Outlook. I don’t use this functionality, but it might come in handy if, for instance, you want all messages from a certain person to be auto-forwarded to one of your contacts.

The Out Of Office Assistant is an extremely valuable tool that you should make sure to take advantage of. Don’t get in trouble because an important email rotted in your inbox while you were at the beach; Take the time to turn on the Out of Office Assistant.