What is the Out of Office reply?

The Out of Office reply feature is an option that connects your Vacation Tracker account with your Email provider and allows you to set an Out of Office reply for your approved leave. Instead of having to set an automated reply manually within Gmail or Outlook, you will be able to use our feature to connect and set everything through Vacation Tracker



Please keep in mind: this feature is completely independent from the calendar syncs/connections we offer.

How does it work?

Out of Office reminders will be dispatched 2 business days before the start date of your approved leave. If your approved leave was approved or added for the following day, the reminder will be sent to you 5 minutes after the approval/after the leave has been added.

All our integrations have the Out of Office option, and the reminders will have the same information across different integrations:

Microsoft Teams Integration

Slack Integration

Google and Email Only Integration

You will be able to use the templated OOO message that we have created for you, or you could edit the message by clicking on “Change Message” and set your own!

If you want to use the templated OOO message, you will click “Set OOO Message” and the message will be set.



If you want to change the templated message, you can click on “Change Message”, and you will be taken to the Vacation Tracker online dashboard to edit the message:



Once the Out of Office message is set, the automated reply will be sent to anyone who reaches out to you via email (in case of companies that use Microsoft Teams, the Teams application will also send the same message).

Some Basic Information for OOO:

Each approved leave request will trigger a reminder for an Out of Office message.

Each reminder that allows you to set an Out of Office message will allow you to set the message for that specific approved leave.

Please keep in mind: if you set the OOO message, you aren’t able to edit it again within Vacation Tracker. You must go into your email provider settings to either remove or edit the message.

The OOO message is the same as the autoreply of your email provider so anyone who contacts you via email will receive the response just like they would with the regular autoreply.

For more information on editing the templated OOO (Out of Office) message, please see the following link: How do I edit the templated OOO (Out of Office) message?

For more information on enabling the OOO feature, please see the following link: How do I enable the OOO (Out of Office) autoreply feature?

For more information on the Microsoft Teams integration and the Teams OOO feature, please see the following link: Microsoft Teams Integration: Turning on the Out of Office / Status Setting within Teams

Updated on: 16/08/2023