Automating OOO replies

Set and forget

A few years ago I got tired of setting my out of office when I was going on any planned annual leave. Having to turn it on and set a message was tedious and I wondered if there was a method to automate it.

I have an o365 account for work which includes PowerAutomate which I thought was perfect for this scenario.

I started by creating a flow that would check for any upcoming calendar events with the keyword “holiday” within it. Employees request annual leave through HR software which is then approved or rejected by a manager. Departmental calendars can be added to employees email clients which synchronises approved annual leave automatically.

Image showing the original flow of this automated process.

Image showing the original flow of this automated process.

Here we define the calendar we want to monitor, the look-ahead time which I've set to 15 and how often we want to check for items which is set to 5 minutes.

The PowerAutomate script I wrote will regularly check-in for the “Holiday” keyword and if there’s a match on the day an action will automatically set your out of office with whatever message you want.

Once you've created the event and the condition you'll next want to set automatic replies.

For extra flair I wanted the auto reply include a date when I will return from annual leave. Fortunately this can be done dynamically with the formatDateTime() function.

We need to format addToTime() as without it you'll get a standard JavaScript fomatted date which doesn't look great on auto-reply emails. Something more familar is needed.

That's all there is to it! Nice and easy can be done in a few minutes and now you don't ever have to think about setting up your auto-replies again. This script has been running for 3 years for me and I've never had to check in on it once.