The Out of Office (OOO) application is one of the most widely used features in Lotus Notes and Domino, enabling users to set up an automatic response to email messages for a specified period that they are “out of the office.” To make it easier for third parties to write custom applications (for example, interacting with OOO from mobile devices or as part of a workflow application) that properly hook into this built-in OOO functionality, Lotus is introducing support for a new OOO API in Domino 8.5.1 and 8.5.2.

As part of the Domino C Software Developer Kit (SDK), the OOO API provides a high-level, easy-to-use interface that ensures interoperability between calling applications using the API and Notes clients. The developer coding the calls to the API does not need to know either the structure of the internal schemas that represent OOO fields or the Domino server configuration that controls the OOO functionality presented to the end user. The developer can simply call a routine and the API handles the rest. For example, the developer can call a routine to enable the OOO functionality for a particular user, and behind the scenes the API will determine whether the user’s home mail server is configured to use the OOO agent or OOO service, and it will specify how the OOO functions should operate given the user’s ACL level. The API then carries out all activities necessary for the OOO feature to function.

It is not difficult to take advantage of the API to allow your users to enable and disable OOO functionality from within your custom applications, or even to automate OOO activities from your applications. It just requires an understanding of the OOO capabilities and architecture and the API calls that are available to you. I’ll give you a guided tour of both and provide some coding examples to get you started.