Out of Office app - official feature request thread

What reporting is available for the out of office app? 

It would be lovely if we could set an expiration date on the OOO app. If I know I'm going to be on vacation from 5/20-5/25, I'd like to set that in the app so I don't forget to un-OOO myself when I get back. Sort of like how Outlook lets you set OOO messages for a date range. 

We have agents that put their out of office on and when they return from leave tickets have reopened in their name because a trigger has run (e.g. reopening a pending ticket after a time). Am I right in that the OOO app will not work when a trigger reopens a ticket or for tickets in pending that might reopen because a customer replies? If so has anyone found a workaround to this issue or is this part of the development needed for the app?  Many thanks. 

Hello folks,

Thank you for the active posts regarding the Out of Office app. As the new Product Lead for the team, it is great to see our user-base have such an active interest in making things better. 

Well we aren't currently working on enhancements to the Out of Office application, the ability to custom roles as well as non-admins more configuration power is on the roadmap for 2024. 

As we progress through some projects, I will be sure to keep this page updated on the progress and when we have more concrete timelines to share. 

We would like to have the ability to have other non-admin custom roles to also have the ability to set agents as Out of Office in case agents forget to do so. This is invaluable for our operations, would reduce potential human error and would offer a much needed flexibility for our leads. 

Hello all, A quick question about the tags





Am I able to add a second tag to this field so I can automate internal comments? Or is that limited to just one?

Hello Zendesk,

Are you planning to make the Out of Office application usable by non-Admin users?

Currently, only Administrators can set agents to Unavailable, which is a serious security issue as we have to provide an Admin role to people who should not.

Thank you.

Hi Zendesk Team,

While browsing through the Out of Office App functionality, I noticed that the app doesn't syncs with Google Calendar.

For example, if an agent has marked themselves OOO on Google Calendar, the Zendesk OOO still shows him as available until he manually toggles the OOO app to unavailable.

Just wanted to confirm - are there any plans on the roadmap to integrate the two to ensure that the Zendesk OOO app automatically updates if an agent is booked on vacation / OOO on Google Calendar?

@Binh Du did you ever figure out how to include open tickets

Our Playlist Routing App has a similar Out of Office feature. While I don't know exactly how Zendesk's app is implemented, I can say that there are API limitations preventing us from designing a scalable and robust solution. We get a lot of clients reporting inconsistencies too. 

Our biggest challenge is with bulk updates. They are delayed and not guaranteed. We'd have to poll job statuses for UpdateConflict errors and retry failed updates. Polling counts against your rate limits, and it's slow. By the time the app retries, it's possible for an agent to be back online already. Polling and retrying is inefficient, defeating the purpose of bulk updating to minimize API requests, so our solution doesn't even bother retrying. Ideally, there is a synchronous bulk update option that we can use to guarantees an update every time. 

Another fundamental issue is that there isn't an API to query for specific tickets using fresh data. Search API is not reliable due to the time required (1 - 5 minutes) to index records for search. We don't have an efficient way to get a full list of the agent's non-closed tickets at scale.

Once these API limitations are addressed, we could make dramatic improvements to our version of Out of Office.