Exclaimer & Exchange Email Signature Management

Guest Article
Sathish Veerapandian - Microsoft MVP - Office Servers and Services

Maintaining a uniform email signature format for all users is really a difficult task, especially if the signature design is changed often depending on a departmental, user or job role basis. There might even be a requirement to add signature elements such as marketing banners or other event information.

As an IT admin, Exchange email signature management becomes very stressful if you don’t have a centralized signature software solution in place to do the hard work for you. Of all the email signature vendors on the market, I have always preferred to use Exclaimer based on their great technical support and the multitude of options available in their products. In this article, we will look Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition and run through some of the options this solution has for Exchange email signature management.

The installation and configuration of Signature Manager Exchange Edition is very simply since the software is basically a Transport Agent that is triggered in the categorizer section of your Exchange server. This is where your email signature is applied to users’ outgoing emails.

The application can be downloaded here.

In Exchange 2010, this software needs to be installed on the Hub Transport server, while it has to be installed on mailbox servers in Exchange 2013 and 2016.

During the setup process, you have the option of keeping a backup of any previous signature configurations you might have. This makes it a lot easier revert back to a previous configuration should you ever need to.

Once you are in the Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition console, you will see an option called Remote Deployment. This is where you need to configure a shared folder for all email signature images. Also, all configuration files are stored in a common location so that all the transport servers can be updated without any delays.

Below are options available for the Sent Items configuration which are pretty easy to understand. As you can see, there is a folder set up that is to hold all temporary files, which is where all signatures are processed before they are applied to users’ messages. You can specify the drive where this folder is to be located on your own.

Once the software has been successfully installed, you can start using the many options available to you to make Exchange email signature management really simple.

You can create multiple policies based on something like a department or organizational unit to affect how the Exchange signature is deployed.

All user details are pulled from your Active Directory. This way, information like Name, Company and Telephone Number will be correctly added to everyone’s signatures. All you need to do is create a new policy and choose the desired values to include in the signature’s contact block.

Note: You need to make sure that all the user information is up-to-date within your AD. If the field is not updated then the information will show empty.

Your signature can be customized further by adding hyperlinked HTML images and all kinds of design layouts are possible within the software’s HTML editor.

Furthermore, you can edit the HTML source code directly within the editor which is a great feature of the product. With this option, you can customize your email signature templates according to your requirements.

When it comes to ensuring the correct users get the correct signature, you have a multitude of options available to you such as the example below.

We can then set exceptions so certain users don’t receive a specific signature. You can even set the signature to appear on a particular date and have it automatically remove itself after something like 30 days.

There are many other features available to you in this product, but the ones described in this article should give you an idea of how Signature Manager Exchange Edition can simplify Exchange email signature management for your company. With this product, you get excellent technical support, comprehensive software updates when they become available and great number of features to customize email signature templates. It works perfectly with every version of Exchange from Exchange 2007 onwards and makes updating and managing signatures easy and straightforward.

About Sathish Veerapandian

Sathish Veerapandian is an IT Consultant in the United Arab Emirates and is the published of Exchangequery.com. He has proven leadership in many server deployment projects and spends a lot of his free time sharing his knowledge through blog posts and helping out within technical Microsoft communities.