Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Standardized Signatures in Outlook 2013/2016 Part 1

So apparently HR had nothing to do today and said they wanted to standardize everyone's email signature.  We are still in the process of migrating to Exchange 2013 so I'm not overly familiar where everything is.  With about 2 minutes of poking around I found the mail flow rules.  Googling how to best do this for a few more minutes revealed that I can pull user fields from AD for our commonized signature.  Well, that saved a ton of time over having to create over 200 custom signatures!  Now, what are the fields I'd be likely to use and what is their name in the AD database?  I few more minutes on Google and I found this.  It is a MS TechNet wiki article on Active Directory Attributes in ADUC GUI Tool.  Perfect!  Choose your ADUC tab from their TOC and it takes you to a screen capture of that tab with all the fields you need to create your signature!  Finally, the new mail flow rule signature must be in html so you can control font, size, etc.

For my test signature I'm applying the rule only to myself and appending the disclaimer.  My test "signature" is:

<div style="font-size:12pt;  font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;">
</br></br>
<B>%%DisplayName%%</B></br>
<B>%%Title%%</B></br>
<B>%%Company%%</B></br>
<B>%%PhoneNumber%%</B></br>
</br></br></br>
</div>

I have another mail flow rule with a disclaimer on it that follows the signature so that is why there are so many breaks.  That and I don't really know html so there is probably a much better way!

This give me a simple signature showing:

My Name
My Title
Company Name
Phone Number

in Calibri 12 font and in bold.  The info below has been changed but it is what my new simple test signature looks like at the end of an email:

John Martin
IT Director
My Company
847-123-4567

So, that's the absolute basics of it.  You can get a creative as your html abilities allow!

Part 2 will be the Group Policy changes needed to enforce this.

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