Chapter 2. Building an Out of Office Delegation Solution

For organizations looking to leverage SharePoint to support collaboration and process automation, it is important to be able to provide a more robust Out of Office solution than what is available within messaging systems like Microsoft Exchange. Those solutions do a good job of providing information that aligns with the user's current status, but it is not something that can be used to automate the delegation or assignment of tasks to ensure that processes continue to complete in a timely manner, while the user is unavailable. The lack of timely responses is one of the biggest challenges with most process automation projects, and it is not enough just to know who the task is currently assigned to.

A variation of this solution could also be used to provide a standing long term delegation for cases such as when a manager wants to delegate all tasks to a subordinate. This general process could be used to log the delegation in the log for...