Microsoft Teams: set out of office message and status to offline

Here’s a question from Richard:

I will be leaving for a vacation this weekend and I think the vacation would be around for 2 weeks. So I would need all the people who are pinging me on Microsoft Teams to know that I am offline and that I am on a vacation. Can you please tell me how we can set them in Microsoft Teams?

Thanks for your question. In today’s short tutorial we will explain how we you can set your status to Offline in Teams and also to define a custom message which will displayed when you are away. Note that if all you want is to reduce the influx of incoming notifications, you can suppress incoming popup alerts in Teams.

Change Status to offline

  • Open your Teams, click on the top of your profile picture.
  • Hover over the Available status and select Appear offline.

Note: Unlike in Skype, it’s currently not possible to set an interval time before showing up as idle in Teams. It’s probable that the product team will address it in future versions. If that’s the case we’ll update the post.

Set out of the office duration

  • Click your profile picture and hover over the Status.
  • Hit on Duration.
  • In the Status drop down, select Appear offline.
  • Under Reset status after drop down, then select Custom and set the date till you need to appear offline.
  • Last, go ahead and hit Done.

Note: You can potentially the Duration setting capability to set Teams to keep and show your status as always available.

Microsoft Teams Out of Office message

  • Click on top of your profile picture and select Set status message.
  • You can now have your out of office message set.
  • Check on Show when people message me, to get Teams to show your out of office message whenever people pings you.
  • Under Clear status message after dropdown you can select Custom and set out the Date till you need the status to get appeared.

Note: The obvious question is why out of office status and message in Teams and Microsoft Outlook are not yet synchronized in the same fashion that Outlook and Skype are. I guess this is also going to come later on.