Better Signature Management (Exchange-bound?)

I manage about eight users in an environment whose email is governed by an Exchange 2010 server (SBS 2011). The users have various devices (phones, computers, etc.) that are not managed by the domain.

We've been trying to come up with a better way to manage the email signatures for one subset of the user-base. In short: We went them all to be the same with the exceptions of name, title, phone, etc.

Right now, I am using a Transport Rule that drops an AD-customized signature into the messages. It works, but the users are squawking over my exception that prohibits applying the signature if the subject line contains "RE:". Admittedly, it's an inelegant way to prevent every outbound message from getting it's signature applied with each new reply.

I'm looking for something better and I hope someone here has a better idea.

Cheers,

m

You have just about hit the limit when it comes to Exchange-native tools.

If commanding your users to follow the rules and use a template isn't an option, then the next stop is some custom programming or third-party software.

I use Exclaimer Signature Manager to push signatures to Outlook based on templates to all of my users. It also sets their OWA signature.

Excalimer also makes a product called Mail Disclaimers that is a transport layer plugin that scans all outgoing messages for an obnoxious string of characters like &&&&&&------&&&&&& and replaces it with a signature. This is useful for clients where you can't push a real signature, such as smartphones, tablets, POP/IMAP clients, and third-party-software. Instead of having the user/app set their signature, you tell them to put in &&&&&&------&&&&&& or whatever and it gets replaced by their signature at the transport layer.

Maybe there are some headers you could key off of? For example, if your email clients are configured to set the "In-Reply-To" header, you could look for that and if its set, don't add a signature.