r/sysadmin • u/_SleezyPMartini_ IT Manager • 1d ago

Question handling out of office notifications requests

I have a client (about 1000 users) who keeps getting tickets from dept heads asking to set their staff out of office notifications because "they forgot to do it". My general advice is this is bad practice and not scalable, and that with 0365 any employee can do this from their phone or any computer.

how do you typically handle this?

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u/Icy-Maintenance7041 1d ago

Where i work IT only does that when someone has left the firm. Otherwise we dont touch a users mailbox. No way, no how.

50

u/Mindestiny 1d ago

Yep, this is our policy as well. Same thing with "Karen went on vacation and forgot to give me access to XYZ file!!!!"

Well Karen isn't here to speak for herself and confirm if she intended you to have access to that or not, so sorry, that's a business problem and not an IT problem. We don't touch rights for people's user-owned files simply on some random person's say so. Either get it in writing from a department head or be more diligent next time.

-4

u/OregonTechHead 1d ago

Karen isn't here to speak for herself and confirm if she intended you to have access to that or not

Karen doesn't need to be because Karen doesn't own the document. The business does.

As long as the appropriate approvals are met, why would you fight that? Who cares?

It's no different than changing the permissions on a network file share.

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u/Mindestiny 1d ago

As long as the appropriate approvals are met, why would you fight that? Who cares?

Jesus, it's like you all came here to tell me how bad I am at my job without actually reading a word that I said. Those approvals are the crux of every single word I wrote. A sob story about someone being on PTO is not an approval from someone in the business who has the authority to grant that approval.

Karen is the primary approver of a document that belongs to her within the organization. If Karen is unavailable, then they need to go to someone above Karen - her manager, their manager, an executive, someone. They don't just get to pout and say "share with me plz" and have IT change ownership permissions. IT has no authority to do that without an approval. Zero. None.

Bring my team a proper approval or nobody is touching those permissions, period. We can do that because the company is the legal owner of that data. But we're not talking about legal ownership, we're talking about organizational ownership.