Exclaimer email signature management solutions vs. Outlook roaming signatures
16 November 2022
First announced in January 2020, Microsoft's Outlook roaming signatures feature, also known as Outlook for Windows: Signature cloud settings, is now in General Availability.
What is the Outlook roaming signatures feature?
The Outlook roaming signatures feature allows email signature templates to be stored in the cloud via a user’s mailbox rather than on a local device.
This means a user’s personal signature is always available when accessing Outlook for Windows from a different desktop device. The feature is useful if you use multiple computers, i.e., a desktop PC at work and a laptop PC at home.
Microsoft also offers a basic library of email signature templates allowing users to include a company logo, photo, website, and social profiles. These can be accessed from within a user’s Outlook client.
Microsoft claims that using these templates can consistently display your brand and contact information. However, these templates are all located within a Word document and require each user within an organization to select, create and copy the template into their Outlook client. These templates can’t be centrally managed and will not link to your Active Directory.
How does the Outlook roaming signatures feature affect businesses?
This feature from Microsoft does not provide anywhere near the same level of design and control as Exclaimer's email signature management solutions. Using Outlook roaming signatures within an organization does not offer the ability to centrally manage email signatures in any way. This means no standardization, no brand consistency, no way to enforce legal compliance, and additional work for an IT department.
Choosing Exclaimer over Outlook roaming signatures
Let’s compare the main reasons Exclaimer email signature management solutions are superior to Outlook roaming signatures.
1. Signatures on all devices
Outlook roaming signatures only work on Outlook for Windows and do not synchronize templates to other devices. So, any HTML email signatures you use in Outlook for Windows will get converted into plain text on other devices, for example on mobiles.
On the other hand, Exclaimer ensures that the same high-quality signature is applied when sending emails from any device. As signatures are added after an email is sent, brand consistency is assured on every message.
2. Centralized management and control
With Outlook roaming signatures, there is no way to centrally manage and standardize signatures. End-users can actively modify their templates, leading to inconsistencies, misspellings, typos, unauthorized amends, etc. Using Outlook roaming signatures can actually cause an organization to lose more control over its email signatures.
It’s also important to note that signature templates will only synchronize on Outlook for Windows. They will not be used when sending emails from:
Outlook Web App (OWA)
Outlook for Mac
Mobile devices such as iOS or Android
Exclaimer solves this problem by centrally managing and standardizing email signatures. Once a signature is created and deployed, all users receive a standardized template that cannot be amended.
Exclaimer also ensures consistency across all devices, from Outlook on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, or Outlook Web App.
3. Drag-and-drop signature editor
The Outlook signature editor only allows you to apply text and images using the standard font options. Some email clients will also strip out any HTML code once they receive a message, with all fonts, colors, and images lost.
Exclaimer lets you easily create template designs using our drag-and-drop signature editor. You don’t need any HTML skills, and updates can be made in minutes.
Our solutions also come with an advanced feature set allowing for additional email signature elements such as:
4. Assign signatures to different users/departments
Exclaimer’s solution lets you easily allocate email signature management roles using the Folder Security function. Separate templates can be placed into different folders, ensuring signatures are only applied to the correct users. In addition, you can also restrict user access so they can only amend specific signatures within certain folders.
With Outlook roaming signatures, email signatures can only be controlled individually. This makes it very difficult to manage companywide and requires a lot of manual work from IT.
5. User data to populate contact details
If you are using Outlook roaming signatures, you are not able to use Active Directory to populate end-users' contact details.
However, Exclaimer integrates directly with your Azure Active Directory, meaning everyone’s details will always be correct. You can even choose to give users control over specific contact information such as gender pronouns and working hours. This reduces the burden on IT teams to manage and update contact information on behalf of employees.
6. Create/manage marketing campaigns
Exclaimer’s solutions can rotate multiple banner designs to start and stop automatically based on time and date. There’s no need to involve your end users to make any changes.
With Exclaimer, you can schedule email signatures to share specific messages to particular audiences and report the effectiveness of your templates using analytics dashboards.
With Outlook roaming signatures, there is no way to easily make updates to signatures across the organization. Every employee would need to manually update their own signature for each required change.
7. Legal compliance
Outlook roaming signatures does not guarantee that an email disclaimer is added to all messages. Email disclaimers are essential in the United States, Canada, and Europe, particularly in the financial services sector, meaning organizations risk not being legally compliant if they rely on employees managing their own signature content.
Exclaimer ensures that your email signatures always contain required legal disclaimers on all outgoing messages according to the organization’s needs. With central control, there is never a worry that business emails will not include a disclaimer that reduces company liability and protects against legal action.
The Exclaimer advantage
Central email signature management
Consistent visual identity across the entire company
Ensured legal compliance with disclaimers added to all emails
Stop end users from editing email signature templates
Support for all email clients and devices (including mobiles)
Set up different signatures for internal and external emails
Signatures are inserted automatically based on rules
User info automatically added to signatures (Azure AD)
Schedule email signature campaigns
Delegate email signature design and management to specific users or departments
Automatic conversion of plain text emails to HTML format irrespective of device
One-click customer satisfaction surveys in email signatures
Easily add signatures for users sending on behalf
Ability to import custom data for dynamic signatures
For more information, read our article Compare Outlook roaming signatures with Exclaimer.
Summary
While Microsoft’s Outlook roaming signatures feature may appear useful, there’s much more to controlling corporate email signatures than just synchronizing to a mailbox.
This feature does not offer centralized design and control, a must for organizations of all sizes. It does not address most email signature management issues and actually causes additional issues for an IT department.
Exclaimer’s email signature solutions offer a feature-rich and intuitive design and management experience, with a level of automation that is not available when using Outlook roaming signatures alone.
We are the most secure, most accredited, and most compliant email signature solution provider in the world, with exceptional satisfaction ratings across our 50,000+ customers. Having worked directly with Microsoft for over 20 years, Exclaimer products use robust and highly available infrastructure within 12 Azure datacenters globally to ensure a 99.99% service uptime.
In fact, it takes us just 300 milliseconds to add a signature to a message, and we process over 65 million emails daily. So, by choosing Exclaimer, you can be assured that your emails will have signatures applied in a safe, secure and compliant fashion.
So, if you want to ensure brand consistency, accurate contact details, legal compliance, and use business email as a personalized marketing channel, choose Exclaimer today.
