I am curious as to how other companies handle the forwarding/reidrection of emails when a employee is out, planned or not. I am the one lone Exchange operator for about 250 people. Serveral departments have time sensitive order acknowledgents emailed to reps. When that rep is out, I am asked to manually foward the mail from Exchange. There are times, like the upcoming Independance Day holiday, when I get multiple requests. I fear that I can miss some. I have brought up several times the idea of the Out of Office Assistant Rules...but I am told that the sales staff DOESNT NEED TO LEARN THAT. So my question, is it fairly standard for the IT department to be in charge of forwarding individual users mail when they are out?

that sounds pretty FUBAR to me. I would never let my sales staff get away with not knowing how to use OOF:-) Do they leave their computers on and in the office or are they laptops? You could create outlook side rules for the users to forward email for them and just have them click to enable the rule when they are going to be gone.