Google’s latest feature: See when someone is out of office in Gmail, Hangouts

Google is rolling out a new feature this month for its G Suite users where it will show a notification to your contacts in Gmail and Hangouts chats that you are away on vacation.

Available for only G Suite (Google's enterprise customers) at the moment and not the ordinary Gmail users, the feature will be fully rolled out globally from September 16, Google said in a statement.

"When you have an Out of office (OOO) entry on your calendar, a notice of that OOO status will appear in Gmail and Hangouts Chat when people try to contact you," said the company.

"In Gmail, we'll show a banner about the recipient being out of office and when they'll be back in the email compose window," Google added.

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In 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.

These notices will automatically start showing up when anyone whose calendar you have access to has an out of office event scheduled.

If you'd like to disable sharing of availability information to other G Suite apps, you can do so in Calendar under Calendar settings -- Access permissions. Just deselect "Show calendar info in other Google apps, limited by access permissions." This feature will be on by default and can be disabled in the Calendar settings if you do not require this.

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