forwarding email with autoreply on Office 365

One of my clients' preferred way to handle a departed employee is to set up an autoreply and forward the email to another staff member.  This doesn't work as it should on Office 365.  With a regular on-premise Exchange server, you can set up the autoreply in the mailbox and configure forwarding with still delivering the message to the departed user's mailbox, and it works as intended.

With Office 365, the forwading happens, but the autoreply doesn't go out even though the mailbox is configured to receive the message.  Very annoying.

To get around this, I had to configure the autoreply and set up an Outlook rule to forward the messages.

While researching this, I found this semi-helpful page on dealing with terminated employees when you have Office 365:
https://www.cogmotive.com/blog/office-365-tips/dealing-with-terminated-employees-in-office-365

how to handle email after an employee's departure

When an employee chooses to leave or is asked to depart an organization, there are five main options that most organizations choose from:

1) the email address is directly forwarded to another staff member who will sort through it and forward personal emails to the departed employee

2) We put up an autoreply that says “for company related items, email 'this staff member' at this address, for personal related items, email the former employee at this address”

3) A combination of 1 and 2 where we forward all emails to another staff member and we put up an autoreply that essentially says "this employee has left the organization, but your email has been forwarded to [name], who will handle your email appropriately"

4) We allow a non-departing staff member to open the departed employee's mailbox as an extra mailbox where the non-departing staff member can view the departed employee's emails in an inbox separate from his/her own.  This can be used with or without an autoreply on the departed employee's mailbox.

5) We delete the former employee’s address so people get a bounceback when they email that address

Out of Office Assistant says "Command not available" when you try to acitvate or deactivate autoreply

I came across this issue for the first time two weeks ago when someone was setting an autoreply and again today when someone was deactivating an autoreply. When you go to Tools -> Out of Office Assistant, it tells you "Command not available."

To fix it, you go here for Outlook XP:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\O

utlook\Resiliency

or here for Outlook 2003:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\O

utlook\Resiliency

and rename the Resiliency key to Resiliency.old

Microsoft does not say why this is the case, but their KB article on this is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327353