William wrote:Is it possible for some sort of rules on the ooo replies?
Yes it is ! But you need to instruct your users and work in synergy with them ...
Generally speaking OOO replies are nothing more the simple automatic replies self enabled by users on their mail account.
They can use either Webmail or Outlook to enable OOO replies.
Using webmail they can either enable OOO reply directly hitting "Tools -> OoO" and switching "I'm in the Office" or "I'm out of office" and entering the reply text (in such way the reply is
always sent regardless the content of the message or the sender or whatever) ...
OR by the usage of the
Rules Wizard: this latter method allows the user to specify "Out Of Office reply" (and it's text) in the "Actions" section, and the conditions that have to be met for the rule to take action. Then the user can easily enable/disable the rule upon their needs. However this method has a problem: Rules Wizard from Webmail
does not implement "negative" conditions on text parts so, for example, you can't create a rule wich says "
Send an Out Of Office Reply each time a message is delivered in my inbox and it's subject DOES NOT contain the word [SPAM]"
Using Outlook users can also enable OoO replies directly (from OL's Tools menu -> Scalix Out of Office ..). The first thing you notice is that using Outlook you can specify a more complex logic (e.g. reply and/or forward) which you can't using webmail. However this OoO rule has no condition to specify and, of course, to honour.
Even OL has it's Rule Wizard : user can create a rule with an
Action set to "Reply with specific message" and an Exception set to "Except when Subject contains specific words" (he can easily set a rule to reply automatically to all messages which DO NOT contain the [SPAM] tag in the subject). However this second method is NOT seen by scalix as a proper OoO reply.
This is where the mail administrator (you) drops in. Using the command line tool sxaa you can (alternatively):
- Let the user create his OoO reply using OL Rules Wizard and then enable the oof switch (eg. sxaa --user "John Doe" --oof y --ref 1000).
- Create the OoO reply for your users (you can send a policy note to them informing that you are in charge of creating OoO replies)
Code: Select all
sxaa --user "John Doe" --reply simple.txt --not --subject "[SPAM]" --title "Out of Office"
This will create an Out Of Office reply with negative condition.
Please take note that there is also another subtle difference in maging rules with webmail or with outlook: using webmail, when a rule gets disabled, it stays in place with the "Enabled" flag switched off, while in Outlook, well ... it is destroyed.
I think that at release 11.4.6 of Scalix the managing of rules is a little bit cahotic and disorganic (you can do some things with Outlook, you miss some options in Webmail, sometimes you need command line to accomplish the task). Really hope this gets solved in future releases with the option to let the users have same results and same tools regardless their client of choice.