Any central signature managment tools for MS Exchange?

June 19, 2008 10:33 AM

ExchangeFilter: any centralized signature/logo/disclaimer management tools you can recommend? I'd rather not go desk to desk to add a logo.

OK, so I asked basically the same question two years ago; I ended up going from workstation to workstation adding a disclaimer to 40 people's signatures in Outlook. (There's a policy that no one is allowed to modify their own signature, so any changes have to be made by IT, which is me.) That involves travelling to 5 different sites, and I'd rather not do it again.

But there's a request in the air to add a logo or some other doodads to the company email signatures. Since my question was asked the first time, perhaps some advancements have been made.
Can this be done by:
1) a new Active Directory feature in Server 2008?
2) a new feature in Exchange 2007?
[we're running Server/Ex 2003 now]
3) if not, and this is still a 3rd-party-software solution, can you recommend any products? Exclaimer seems to come up a lot - any reviews?

posted by bartleby to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Are you also running a spam filter server like Barracuda? They have a provision to append a disclaimer on outgoing messages.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:50 AM on June 19, 2008

You should call it a "footer."
posted by rhizome at 10:52 AM on June 19, 2008

Thanks, rhizome - I already tried footer and several other variants in my pre-question searches - and I noticed that just about every article was from 2006 or earlier.
Most also mention Exclaimer. Most hits also turned out to be links I saved back in 2006.
Googling was disappointing; Ask MeFi tends to be smarter and more up to date than google for this kind of thing - so I asked again.
posted by bartleby at 11:05 AM on June 19, 2008

DisclaimIT is cheap and it works fine.
posted by damn dirty ape at 11:18 AM on June 19, 2008

You definitely can do signatures/disclaimers in Exch2007 (google: "transport rule") but as far as I know there are not options to add images in that rule configuration.
I believe you can add signatures with images with software called Policy Patrol, but given the number of issues that particular piece of software has caused me, I can't say I'd recommend it.
In general, any external software that gets its hooks into the Exchange categorization process can/does cause issues eventually. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about it. Thanks.
posted by 8dot3 at 12:09 PM on June 19, 2008

Well, to be sure, the links are going to be from before 2006 because we're talking about event sinks and Exchange 2003. Also, as far as mandating a particular .sig in Outlook you could be centrally managing that with a GPO that wouldn't (or shouldn't) require you to travel between sites or desktops.

Also, further reading.
posted by rhizome at 12:18 PM on June 19, 2008

Seconding rhizome's suggestion of Group Policy. We've done something similar with a GP add-on called PolicyMaker and the Outlook snapin. I think that Policy Maker may have been bought by MS, and incorporated, so you may have it already.

We fill the signature with AD attributes, formatted a certain way, etc. The only thing we don't do is FORCE it to be used, but that option is there.
posted by Richat at 6:09 PM on June 19, 2008