This week I had a colleague troubleshoot some crazy issues in regards to the Out of Office Assistant. The actual complaints are as follows:

1. “We have a problem with the Out of Office Assistant being enabled and when the employee comes back to work and turns it off, it will not disable.”

2. “The Out of Office settings are not functional and are not sending back auto-out messages.”

The mailboxes are hosted on an Exchange 2007 CCR cluster which had failed over but the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants service (MSExchangeMailboxAssistants) did not start when the failover occured, causing the two issues above.

Taking from the Exchange 2007 Help Files, the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants service is required on an Exchange 2007 Mailbox server and “provides functionality for Calendar Attendant, Resource Booking Attendant, Out of Office Assistant, and Managed Folder Mailbox Assistant. This service is dependent upon the Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology service.”

So if you have similar problems with your Out of Office Assistant, be sure to check the status of the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Assistants service!