Prevent "Anyone outside my organization" in Outlook 2007 OOF

[techpatriot]

I would like to allow my users to send Out of Office replies to external
recipients, but only if the sender appears as an entry in the user's personal
Outlook contacts.

I have my Exchange 2007 server set to "Allow external out-of-office messages
only". In Outlook 2007 Out of Office Assistant properties there are two
options on the "Outside My Organization" tab:

"My Contacts only"
and
"Anyone outside my organization"

This is a user selectable option and I would like to prevent users from
being able to select "Anyone outside my organization". In other words, if
the user chooses to send auto-replies to people outside of the organization
it needs to be based on "My Contacts only", not just anyone.

Is it possible to disable the "Anyone outside my organization" option
through group policy, a registry change, or something else?

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

The settings are stored in the mailbox, not in the registry.

See http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx - I think you
can only control internal/external - not limit it to contacts, but the
exchange guys would know for sure -
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.exchange.misc


--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



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[techpatriot]

Thanks for that helpful link to msexchangeteam.com. Through there I learned
that I can control external OOF replies on a per user basis, rather than just
the whole domain as with Exchange 2003 or older. This, so far, is my best
option.

Per User Settings:

Exchange 2007 lets administrators control per-user external OOF messages
using the Monad command "Set-Mailbox" with the "ExternalOOFOptions"
parameter:

MSH>Set-Mailbox -id <mailbox identity> -ExternalOOFOptions
[InternalOnly,External]

By default, per-user external OOF option is set to allow external OOF. By
setting this to "InternalOnly" for a given mailbox, instead of "External",
that mailbox will not be able to send OOF messages outside the company, using
any client, regardless of what the user selects.

Next I should see if there are more options to the ExternalOOFOptions command.

-John