Out of office assistance in Outlook 2003 disabled?!

Did somehow your “Out of office” assistant get disabled?
When you click on Tools>Out of Office Assistant do you get an error message:

“The command is not available. See the program documentation…blah blah blah”

There is a registry fix that you can do, but it doesnt always work.

Simple fix. Outlook likes to disable add-in’s (yes the OOO is an add-in) if it thinks it is causing a problem.

Fix:

In Outlook go to Help, select > about Microsoft Outlook. Select disabled items. Out of office assistant is in the dialouge box, enable it.

Tada!

or……………

One fix is (but it doesnt always apply to the problem) from the Knowledge Microsoft Base…:

The command is not available. See the program documentation about how to use this extension.

CAUSE
This behavior may occur if the following key is present in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Resiliency

To rename that “resiliency” key to .old and restart the machine/outlook.