In the coming weeks, Google will roll out a new feature for its G Suite users, which will show a notification to their contacts in Gmail and Hangouts chats when they are away for vacation.
Now, if a user has an Out of office (OOO) entry on their calendar, a notice of that OOO status will appear in Gmail and Hangouts Chat when people will try to contact them. In Gmail, Google will show a banner about the recipient being out of office, and when they’ll be back in the email compose window.
In the Hangouts Chat, you’ll also see a small notification in the chat compose window, alerting you that the person you’re trying to message is out of office.
‘With this launch, before people even hit "send," your time out of office is visible in more places across G Suite, meaning you get more uninterrupted time away. As a sender, you’ll also have more confidence that you’re messaging people at an appropriate time,' Google said in a blogpost.
These notices will automatically start showing up when anyone whose calendar you have access to has an out of office event scheduled.
And if you’d like to disable sharing of information about your availability to other G Suite apps, you can do so in Calendar under Calendar settings > Access permissions. Simply deselect ‘Show calendar info in other Google apps, limited by access permissions.’
The feature has started rolling out gradually. This feature will be ‘On’ by default and can be disabled in your Calendar settings.
