Out of Office

The Out of Office node is used to list and change users' Out of Office status, and to configure a user's Out of Office settings on their behalf. For example, you may need to set up Out of Office delegation rules when an employee is absent from work, so that their K2 task list items are shared with other users who can complete the tasks on their behalf.

The Out of Office node provides a view of all the users who have Out of Office rules configured. You can add, edit, remove or save Out of Office settings. After configuring the Out of Office settings such as Forward To and Exceptions settings, see the Working with Out of Office section to understand how to set a user's Out of Office status.

When a user is set as Out of Office the system registers the current date. There is a known issue where tasks are not forwarded to the configured user because of the operating system's short date format. For more information and resolution, see Known issue: Out of Office setting not sending tasks to forwarded user.

Forward To vs. Exceptions

Out of Office rules are set up per-user, and each user may define two different types of rules: Forward To and Exceptions.
Forward To is a general setting that delegates all work items assigned to the Out of Office user to someone else. (Here is an example: a manager may want to delegate all their work items to their assistant while the manager is out of office.) Users can also decide to forward their work to multiple users: in this case, K2 creates multiple copies of the task and whoever “opens” the task first takes ownership of that task (there will always only be one active copy of a task).
Exceptions are used to define exception rules for specific types of work items.

These are applied when tasks of a particular event should be directed to specific people, rather than the people specified in the Forward To section. (Here is an example: a manager may want to delegate all their work items to their assistant while the manager is out of office, which is configured in the Forward To section. However, any Expense Approval tasks should be delegated to the Finance Manager instead, which will require you to define an Exception for those types of tasks.) While the user is out of office, any items meeting the exception rule criteria will be forwarded to the people specified in the exception rule only, while other tasks will be forwarded to the people listed in the main Forward To configuration.

Out of Office User Settings

Out of office rules are enabled/disabled and configured per individual user.

Forward To settings

The Forward To section is used to set up general delegation rules to forward all of the user's tasks (other than those covered by Exceptions) to other users.

Exceptions

Exceptions are applied when the Out of Office user wishes to direct tasks of a particular type to specific destination user(s). While the user is Out of Office, any items meeting the exception rule will be forwarded to those user(s) specified in the exception rule only, while all other tasks will be forwarded to the user(s) listed in the main Out of Office configuration. You can add, edit or delete Exception rules.