My signature moment..
Several years ago I had a most "blinding" idea - however it was one that had well and truly been thought out and documented elsewhere. But with my "Keep I.T. Simple" hat on I'll now show you mere mortals how to create a cloud based email signature for your Office365 email.
Firstly, Microsoft never meant this feature to be used for signatures - it was meant to put in the disclaimer at the bottom as in please respect the environment and don't read the email (even the juicy confidential bits) if you are not the intended recipient and so on and so forth.
The good thing with the disclaimer is that it supports HTML - it also supports environment variables (within the Microsoft environment), so things such as your telephone number, name and email address can be automatically injected - which is handy if your Office365 environment has multiple users.
For a full rundown of the environment variables and the ability to impress and put to sleep your nearest and dearest head to
Now if you are looking to get a bit geeky with the HTML side you will need an online HTML viewer so that you can see the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) before you paste it into the disclaimer. One such example and one that I would use from time to time is at https://html-online.com/editor/ and then a handy place to reference the images used in your signature e.g. company logo, trade logos, awards, certifications etc. Typically this can be the picture repository of your website or an online file sharing system that allows read only, non-expiring file sharing links.
So, to get started you need to open up the admin portal for Microsoft Exchange, it will look something like this :-
Next under the "mail flow" section, select "rules" and you will see something similar to this :-
Note - the rules have been deleted in the above example for obvious reasons
Next, click on the "+" and then select "Apply disclaimers..."
You will now see something similar to the above. Give the rule a name - this is just for your own purposes, and select an action under the "Apply this rule if..." drop down box. The easiest here is the selection referring to "The sender is located.... inside the organisation", although you can select other options such as specifically naming the sender. These options are quite easy to work out but if you are left scratching your head I am a kindly person so I could help you.
So, with having selected who the disclaimer is to be for you now need to enter the text by clicking on the "Enter text..." link to the right of the "Do the following..." selector.
Now this is where you enter your HTML and all the fancy stuff (if HTML is your "thing"). Here is a template that you can use to get you going - however you must ensure that what you paste in here is something that has previously been created / edited in a HTML viewer first so that you have an idea what it will look like. There will be a sequence of tweaks with positioning, font sizes etc. before you arrive at something you can tell the grandchildren about...
Note, you will need to edit the template to suit your own circumstances and how you want everything to look - this is just an idea to base your artistic side on.
Once you have got your design in it's first draft you will need to send some test emails to yourself or long suffering partner / close relative.
However make sure that having entered your HTML in the text box and clicked on "OK" you need to select IGNORE (they are other options but for this purpose IGNORE is the best bet) and then save.
After this it is just a case of tweaking the text by going back into the rule you have created and editing it / saving it and sending more emails.
NOTE when sending more emails as part of the testing phase there is a time delay for the revised signature/disclaimer text to become live - this is typically 10 minutes but could be more. So ensure you have a working kettle and tea/coffee to keep you occupied during this delay.
Hopefully this helps some of you out there. If you need any help then KITS IT (besides anything with a flashing light on it) can sort out a mean email signature :)
