Symptoms

When assigning a user as out of office, we would like to set an exception to not forward a specific worklist item to the user set as someone's out of office. Is this possible? Currently when we go to configure an exception we can not do this via the UI.

Also is there a way to see a notification if the user we are assigning as our "Forward all work items to" is also set as out of office at the time?
 

Diagnoses

Currently there is no way to do an exception where the worklist item is not forwarded. We can set an exception to send that worklist item for that activity to another user but we can not set it do avoid the forward action. Setting the same user in the exception is not allowed as well.

There is also currently not a flag set to notify the user that this "forward all work items to" is also set to out of office.
 

Resolution

Feature request has been logged for these two issues with K2 Out of Office functionality:

"Ability to Set Granular Out of Office Exception Rules" (Exception issue)
"Add a notification for if you set a user to receive your forwarded work items and they are already set to out of office themselves"

For now there are a few workarounds to achieve what we are looking for above.

Workarounds:
If we need to set a user as our out of office but do not want them to receive a certain worklist item, we can have an exception set to forward to a dummy user. This could be a placeholder AD account that no one uses and will get forwarded the worklist item that we do not want the other user that gets forwarded our worklist item to receive. See this documentation on showing that an exception needs to have a user assigned to it:

http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/K2blackpearl/UserGuide/current/webframe.html_Out_of_Office_Exception_Scenario.html

For the notification for a user being set to out of office, we will have to manually check if that user is in fact set as out of office via the workspace management console. Any user that has set out of office will be added to a list that is located under Management Console -> Workflow Server -> Users -> Out of Office. Here is our documentation:

http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/K2blackpearl/UserGuide/current/webframe.html_Users_Out_Of_Office.html