When the holiday season is getting closer you will get those questions again – how to prepare your GroupWise account for a nice holiday as well? And you will get even more questions from people that have moved from Outlook to GroupWise. 

 

After some time and proper instructions people will probably soon start to appreciate GroupWise a lot, however most of them will not get a lot of warm feelings for GroupWise when they start preparing for their holiday. Unlike Outlook the current GroupWise client does not offer an easy to create a holiday rule and to block the calendar. Of course proper holiday rules are described in many places on the web, in magazines and in books (for example in topic 129 of "The GroupWise Powerguide", check it out!). And partners like Advansys have created tools to easily create holiday rules as well (see www.advansyscorp.com). Still, it’s difficult to explain to somebody who want to go on holiday tomorrow why simple things can be so complicated. So hurrah for the GroupWise engineering team, as they now have created a very cool new Vacation wizard.

 

 

 

The image above actually tells the whole story, you simply check the box "Activate my vacation rule" and enter a subject which will be added to the reply. Don’t make the subject too long, as this text will be added to the existing e-mail subject between “()” automatically as part of the reply. You can also enter a message, referring all urgent questions to one of your colleagues. The checkbox "Reply to External Users" seems obvious, however please note that some organizations block automatically generated replies to the outside world on their GroupWise Internet Agent, which sends and receives all messages from and to the Internet.

 

By the way, it might be interesting to know that GW 7.0.2 and higher have a few new GWIA switches, which allow you to manage "Rule generated forwards" and "Rule generated replies" separately. So you can now block "Forwards" to an external mailbox, but still allow holiday replies.

 

Now the cool part about this vacation wizard is that it will also block your calendar with an "All Day" appointment marked as "Out of Office" if you enter the start and end date of your holiday. So this way the rule will only work as long as you’re on holiday. And the cool news is, you can simply deactivate the rule and then later on make a few changes for your next holiday before you activate it again. 

 

So it simply works as expected now, no more hassle. If you’re interested, behind the screens there’s a little more going on, as Novell cleverly used the existing rule engine. If you have activated the Vacation Rule you might want to go to "Tools" -> "Rules" and you will see that this very cool holiday rule has been added to your list of rules. Check it out, as there are some interesting elements in there.