The yet to be released Lotus Notes 8 will have an additional feature included for setting up Out of Office messages. This new service can function only with Lotus Notes 8 Client, Lotus Domino 8 server and Lotus Notes 8 mail template. However, the present Out of Office agent is still available for backward compatibility, which means a Lotus Notes 8 client connected to a Lotus Domino server 7 or lower version can still use the out of office feature as available now. The new OOO service is an additional feature and has specific advantages over the earlier agent like an instant response as opposed to a response time of six hours. Another advantage would be the automatic disabling of the feature at the end of the period set by the user without having to manually disable it. In the new out of office service the OOO message can be set even for a period of one hour compared with a minimum of one day with the present agent.

To know more about this, read this post from IBM developer works.