The short answer
A holiday schedule is what saves callers from hearing the daytime menu on Yom Kippur. On its dates, every auto attendant that carries it plays its Holiday menu, whatever the time and whatever the business-hours schedule says.
Adding the dates
- Open Schedules in the portal and open your Holiday Schedule.
- Add one event per closure. Give it a name with the year in it, tick All Day, and enter the start and end dates as
MM/DD/YYYY, two digits for the month and the day. - Save.
- On each auto attendant, on the Holiday tab, make sure the Holiday Schedule is the one picked, and that the Holiday menu has a greeting and a destination. Save.
Holidays are entered a year at a time, because the dates move. Past events stay in the list after they pass and do no harm; only an event dated today or later closes anything. Prune them once a year if you like the list tidy.
The Jewish holidays, the way the office enters them
One event per holiday, named with the year, covering the days you close. For 5787 that looks like:
| Event name | Dates |
|---|---|
| Rosh Hashanah 2026 | 09/12/2026 to 09/13/2026 |
| Yom Kippur 2026 | 09/21/2026 |
| Sukkos 2026 | 09/26/2026 to 09/27/2026 |
| Shemini Atzeres and Simchas Torah 2026 | 10/03/2026 to 10/04/2026 |
A business that closes for all of chol hamoed enters the whole stretch as one event instead. An early close on erev yom tov is an event with times rather than All Day: the date, from your closing time to 11:59 PM. Passover, Shavuos and Purim follow the same pattern in the spring.
The holiday greeting
The Holiday menu has its own greeting. Type it and let text to speech read it: the closure, when you reopen, and what a caller can press. Point the keys at a mailbox so a caller can leave a message, or at the person who covers emergencies. See greetings and hold music and auto attendants.
A one-day closure or a vacation
A single closed day is one event on the same Holiday Schedule, and it plays the same Holiday menu, so keep that greeting general ("we are closed today") or change it for the day. One person away for a week does not need a holiday at all: their calls go to a colleague with Call Forwarding Always, or their cell rings on a schedule through Office Anywhere. See Office Anywhere.
Hunt groups and queues on a holiday
Groups and queues have no holiday setting of their own. A number that rings a group directly, without a menu in front, gets its holiday behaviour from Call Forwarding Selective on the group with the Holiday Schedule attached, forwarding to a mailbox on those dates. Tell us the dates and the mailbox and we build it.