Auto-updating email sig

[jayctech]

This is something an acquaintance of mine asked me to look into and I think it'd be quite fun to figure out.

 

Basically the company he works at puts awards the company has in the signatures of the workers. Problem is half the time people don't update it and the clients get inconsistencies. He's looking to have it so there's one image on the server and if he changes that image it'll automatically change on everyone's (future) emails. I think he's open to the idea of it being hosted online instead but locally on the server is his preference.

 

Oh and the mail client they use is Outlook and their email is hosted on 365 if that's important information.

 

 

All thoughts appreciated.

[omniomi]

This can be done with Group Policy if their office is setup on an Active Directory domain. The exact steps depend on the version of Group Policy being used (the version of Windows the AD server are running on). But usually a Word document copy of the signature must  be stored on a fileserver somewhere and then Group Policy is set to fire off a PowerShell script that forces the clients to apply the .doc file as the signature with a number of variables pulled from Active Directory (name, phone extension, etc.) so the signatures are unique but uniform. When you want to update the signature you just update the word document.

 

Note however that Group Policy changes are only applied once every 7 days or when a computer reboots (Computer Policy) or a users logs out and back in (User Policies)... although there are ways to trigger gpupdate /force across a network for user policies without users having to do anything. 

 

Directly related to Office 365, I also found this: http://thecloudmouth.com/2012/03/13/signatures-and-disclaimers-in-exchange-online/ but I am not sure if it will work with Outlook or not... I have very little experience with Office 365.