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For Entourage/Exchange users, Out Of Office assists in setting and monitoring your away message and status for those connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server. While not a terribly difficult task to perform, setting an away message via Outlook Web Access (OWA) can be annoying if you change it often. OWA's interface isn't exactly pretty and the speed usually leaves something to be desired. Out Of Office provides a simple MacOS interface, speedy response, and an easy way to manage your away message.
Version 1.2:
- The ability to turn on debug-level logging without needing another application compiled and delivered (meant for this to be in 1.1).
- Added a help file which should clear up some of the confusion some users were having with configuring preferences.
- If the user selected "Check Status Now" when the preferences window was still open, recent changes would not be saved. "Check Status Now" forces the window to close which saves any changes.
- In some configurations, the user's login username is not the same as the "Exchange ID", the internal ID OWA uses to build URLs. Initial startup of the app now polls OWA to find the correct base URL to use for all subsequent requests.
- App now correctly recognizes when to and when not to append /exchange/ to the end of the URL. This still may be a known problem for users who's URLs do not contain an /exchange/ suffix at all.
- Changed text in preferences window to read "Outlook Webmail URL" instead of "Exchange Server URL" as these are usually not the same and was causing some confusion.
- Default time to poll changed from 10 minutes to 2 hours. 10 minutes was a bit aggressive. This only applies to new installs or to users who delete their saves configurations. Existing user settings are not modified.
** KNOWN/UNRESOLVED ISSUES
- Out Of Office currently only works with webmail configurations that use HTTP authentication. If your webmail presents a specific webpage for you to enter in credentials (as is the case with most SecurID users), Out Of Office is not able to handle that interaction at this time.
- A big weakness in the app is it's inability to show that it's "thinking"; whether that be waiting for user input, for OWA to respond, etc. There is no way to insert animated gifs as the menu icon (which would look tacky anyways) so for now, until I come up with a good way to display a tiny progress bar, there is no "in progress" GUI feedback.
v1.1
- App now generates a request for the current status when new preferences are installed.
- When a preference is missing, we focus on the item that is missing instead of letting the user guess what's missing.
- App now watches for when the computer wakes from sleep and forces an immediate check of status. There was an issue where the icon was disappearing when waking from sleep and this is an attempt to fix that.
- Reworked how the pref window displays itself so that it'll actually come to the front.
- When the user set a one-time disposable password (no private or Entourage keychain used), the app never displayed the preferences box to prompt for the password again on restart. This will also pop up if Entourage's keychain does not contain a password.
- Fixed a problem with the OOO message not scrolling. Seems the enclosing scrollview had set it's scrollby value to 0. Stupid scrollview.
- Discovered the cause of the mysterious "app would disappear or fonts would be replaced with boxes" bug: WebKit doesn't drop the socket to the Exchange server unless you implicitly tell it to. So we were filling up our processes max open files allotment. This has been fixed.
v1.0
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