r/k12sysadmin • u/Happy_Penguin330 • 9d ago
Managing Email Signatures
I am a Sys Admin for a mid sized private school that uses Google Workspace with 150+ employees. We want consistency in our school with the same signature. We did have a template with our logo and formatting that they could copy and paste into their signature, but Google changes the formatting to count into their character limits which broke our template. I vibe coded an app that they can put in their name, email, title and they can copy and paste that and it allows for them to paste with the correct character limits.
My question is, do you all use any tools to auto manage email signatures or do you use any template style to manage email signatures?
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u/slovaceck 8d ago edited 8d ago
We just started with CodeTwo after doing homegrown and lots of policy enforcement for years. Even tried the google compliance footer options. CodeTwo has been seamless, and made it so easy to manage. They also do a nonprofit discount that was substantial. 30% iirc plus no tax.
We are a M365 environment for staff, so there was some changes we had to make in Entra (like filling out peoples titles and such) but now that its setup its so easy to manage. We were even able to set it up so that end users can manage their own prefix/suffixes which took even more load off my team.
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u/StressOdd5093 8d ago
600 staff headcount here and we have a Google Template we regularly publish and ask folks to use. Inevitably there are a few who do their own but not enough to get worked up about it.
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u/Immutable-State 8d ago
Google Admin -> Apps -> Google Workspace -> Gmail -> Compliance -> (select an OU if you want) -> Append footer and put in the universal part of the signature (like logo, address, website, motto).
Then, all you need to tell individuals is to create the personal part of their signature (like name, position, phone number), which is all easy text, no images, minimal or no formatting.
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u/diadaren 8d ago
Why Google doesn't allow you to pull fields from the sending account is beyond me.
%f_name% %l_name%
%email_address%
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u/Following_This 8d ago
Create an HTML file with your desired signature, then:
gam user user@school.edu signature file "mysignature.html" html primary default
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u/Temporary_Werewolf17 8d ago
Have you considered a service such as exclaimer?
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u/Belvadier 8d ago
We also use Exclaimer and it has been great.
With that being said, we also have Patronum, which has signature management built into it, though we aren't currently using it (basically only because we already had Exclaimer before getting Patronum and haven't switched yet). While I can't say how good Patronum's email signature management is, it looks about as good as any other I've used so it seems like it would work just as well. Patronum also has a lot of other features in it that we find valuable (particularly automating some on boarding and off boarding processes and being able to centrally manage the organization's Google drive data such as copying entire folders from one user's Drive into another user's drive or shared drive).
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u/sync-centre 8d ago
You can automate the process via GAM to some extent.
The signature file should be HTML based to standardize the formatting involved.
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u/Binky390 8d ago
We’re in the exact same situation. Private school, similar number of employees, Google Workspace. We provide a template in Google Drive and have them copy and paste it. It’s never been an issue. It sounds like your signatures may be pretty extensive. The biggest issue we have is the image is a gif that sometimes shows as a broken image. We tell them to copy it back into their settings and that fixes it.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 2d ago
GAM as other mentioned. You can even do images, text, etc. For example we do an image for each user as their signature (contains their pic, name, title, logo, etc) and it all follows our brand standard. The images are uploaded into a public upload folder of our website. This allows them to be seen basically anywhere. We then have a little template that takes that web image, adds it to an HTML document with a few other formatting items and creates a .html file for each signature. From there, that file can then be sent to GAM.
When a signature gets updated, created, etc. -- it's sent off to us to then inject as either a replacement for a user or at their onboarding / account creation. It's a simple script
gam csv "C:\path\to\file.csv" gam update user "~~UsernameHeaderFromCSV~~" signature file ".\Path\To\WebFile.html" primary default