Standardized Outlook Signatures…For FREE

Well, apparently 10 bucks a user isn’t cheap enough for some people, so I had to figure out a cheaper (read: FREE) way to push out standard signatures to our users. It doesn’t make sense to create signatures for each employee by hand, and I can’t really trust users to follow directions in an e-mail telling them what signature they have to use, so what we have here is a completely automated way to push out a standardized company signature to your Outlook 2003 users leveraging the information you have in Active Directory.

Big credit goes out to joshiieeii over at the AutoIt Script forums. I could have easily coded this myself, but his post HERE saved me most of the effort. Why reinvent the wheel anyway? Josh’s original script used some XML files and ExCmd to create your custom signatures and even pushed your signature out to OWA. The OWA support is more than I wanted though, and the XML approach was a bit tedious IMO, so I modified his script so that you basically create your html, rtf, and plain-text sigs as individual files and it modifies them for each user using the data stored in AD. This makes it much easier to go back and make changes to your signatures on the fly instead of having to dig back down into the script and XML documents to make a simple change. Once you have your signature templates setup, just configure a GPO to run the script at logon and it will silently create HTML, RTF, and plain-text signatures for each user.

I’d just like to interject here that AutoIt is a VERY powerful and little known scripting language which I have used to write all kinds of utilities in the past. I strongly recommend that you check it out if you have any interest in writing your own scripts and don’t want to mess with vbs or, god forbid, batch files.

So, THAT solves the problem of how to create the sigs, but how in the world do you push that change out to all your desktops? We’re talking about an Active Directory enabled environment here, so it makes most sense to leverage GPO’s for stuff like this. Unfortunately, the Outlook 2003 administrative template (OUTLK11.ADM) that Microsoft provides only gives you the option to disable signatures — what’s the point in THAT? So, MS didn’t provide us with a way to administratively set a default signature for Outlook, but as usual the lovely Sue Mosher has the answer for all things Outlook. Seriously, I cannot count the number of times I have been researching a problem only to have Sue come up with the answer. In this newsgroup post, Sue links to a small ADM file (contents below) that will allow us to set a default signature via GPO. I merged this into my existing OUTLK11.ADM file (just open it in notepad) so that the resulting “Signature” category looks like this:

CATEGORY “Signature”
POLICY “Disable signatures for new messages”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Disable signatures for new messages” CHECKBOX
                VALUENAME NewSignature
                VALUEON “”
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Disable signatures for replies and forwards”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Disable signatures for replies and forwards” CHECKBOX
                VALUENAME ReplySignature
                VALUEON “”
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Signature for new messages”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Signature for new messages” EDITTEXT
                VALUENAME NewSignature
                
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Signature for replies and forwards”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Signature for replies and forwards” EDITTEXT
                VALUENAME ReplySignature     END PART
    END POLICY
END CATEGORY
END CATEGORY

Then I just added the ADM file to my policy and configured it to point to the name of the signature files I created using the script. For example, if the files generated by your script are mycompany.txt, mycompany.rtf, and mycompany.htm, then you would just use “mycompany” as your signature name when configuring the GPO. You can even use command-line variables here (%username% for example).  Note that you MUST have Office 2003 SP2 installed for this policy to work.

And that’s it! You now have a fully automated signature for all of your Outlook users based on the information in Active Directory and enforced by Group Policy! It doesn’t get any easier than that!

You can grab my version of the script here, and my modified OUTLK11.ADM file here.