Change "Out of Office" message for another user

This allows you to change the "Out Of Office" message for another user, and also specify other settings for them, without the need to know their password. This requires that you have Outlook Web Access enabled (OWA for short), and of course you have to have access to the other user's account. The specific permissions needed would be "Read permissions" and "Full mailbox access", which can be set for the user in the Exchange Advanced tab in their Active Directory account properties. The default Administrator account likely was granted these permissions by default as well, so if you have that account enabled and would rather use that to login that should work too.

Doing this is surprisingly simple, and much easier than resetting the user's password so you can access their account. First, login to your OWA account with the user account that has mailbox access to the account you want to modify. Once logged in, in the URL, add /username/Inbox to the end of it. For an example, when I login as the administrator, the URL of my Inbox is https://owa.mydomain.com/exchange. If I want to change the account for a user named User1, then I would change the URL to be https://owa.mydomain.com/exchange/User1/Inbox and then go to that page. That should take you to User1's Inbox via OWA, and from there you can go into the Options and set the Out Of Office assistant to respond however you need it to.

This works for accounts that are disabled as well, without the need to re-enable them. This can be very helpful if you want some type of auto-reply for users that are no longer at the company you work for without having to get into server-based rules. Thanks go to lazynetworkadmin.com for their post about the same thing