Office 2007: Programmatically control Out-Of-Office assistant?

Question

Does anybody know how to programmatically enable/disable the actual state of the out-of-office auto-responder in Outlook 2007?

Already searched the object browser in VS 2008 and found the enumeration Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlBusyStatus but i didn't find any class or anything else using this.

Any idea is appreciated, thanks and regards

Answer 1

UPDATE: Updated the code below using sample code adapted from this blog post which will work better in a wider variety of Outlook installations (e.g. ones using both Exchange and PST or accessing multiple Exchange mailboxes).

Here's code which worked for me on Outlook 2007, to set the OOF status from an external (to Outlook) EXE:

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.ApplicationClass();
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.NameSpace ns = app.Session;
foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Store store in ns.Stores)
{
    if (store.ExchangeStoreType == Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlExchangeStoreType.olPrimaryExchangeMailbox)
    {
        store.PropertyAccessor.SetProperty("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x661D000B", true); // false to turn off OOF
        break;
    }
}

Make sure you're not running that code as Administrator and outlook as non-Administrator-- otherwise you may get a security-related error on Vista.

Note that it will pop up security dialogs inside Outlook to ensure the user is OK with you accessing the Outlook object model. This is normal when outlook object model is accessed from an external EXE.

If, however, you're accessing the object model from an add-in, the code above isn't fully correct: instead of creating a new Outlook.Application object via the constructor, you you need to get a reference to the trusted Outlook.Application object from inside your add-in, like this:

Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.NameSpace ns = this.Application.Session;
foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Store store in ns.Stores)
{
    if (store.ExchangeStoreType == Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OlExchangeStoreType.olPrimaryExchangeMailbox)
    {
        store.PropertyAccessor.SetProperty("http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x661D000B", true); // false to turn off OOF
        break;
    }
}

BTW, there's a good MSDN article on security for add-ins, which may be useful if you run into security dialogs or errors.