I have added a tutorial under Email in the main menu which covers the steps you need to take to configure an out of office email responder. It is not very difficult to do, and will ease the administrative burden when people are out of the office.
I have indicated to some groups that this feature is not possible in the hosting we are using, it turns out it is. The only issue is that it is not seemlessly integrated with Outlook and MS Exchange Server which is possibly where you may have come across it before.
Go to this page to learn about how it works, and how to set it up. This article is password protected.