The IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Out of Office service: Best practices

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http://www.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/01072009040728PMWEBSS8.htm

I am a Software Engineer with IBM’s Lotus Technical Support, serving on the Notes/Domino Application Development team for the past seven years. Our team supports all things Domino Designer, including the Out of Office Agent (currently ½ of the Out of Office Feature).

In supporting the Out of Office Feature back then, I also noticed that we kept receiving the same types of calls daily, and I wondered: “What is so complex about this feature? Why has this topic been our team’s #1 call generator, every month for (at least) six years now (factoring in the infinite combinations of design elements available for custom database design)”?

In my quest for answers, I dove in headfirst and found many dependencies—not all of them agent related—that are required to make this innocuous-looking client menu option work properly. The complexity of the feature multiplied exponentially with the introduction of Lotus iNotes (release 5.0.5) and then again with Notes client-side editor-level access through AdminP (release 6.0). Out of the 150+ Support Technotes/Techdocs I found on the Out of Office feature back then, none of them addressed how it really worked, end-to-end, nor its configuration requirements.

The results of my research include the four-part Techdoc series, Guide to the Notes/Domino Out of Office, an FAQ Technote, an internal Knowledge Collection Technote, and a customer-facing Webcast on Troubleshooting the OOO Feature (delivered May 2008). In response to numerous requests, the aim of this article is to dive deeper into the ND8 Out of Office service, supplementing the information in last year’s developerWorks article, "The new IBM Lotus Notes 8 Out of Office functionality," in addition to the above-mentioned Webcast.