How Email Signature Manager Works

Email Signature Manager comprises the following components:

•Main Application for managing signatures, and configuring and monitoring deployment.

•Database holding settings, templates, deployment configuration and status information.

•Service responsible for generation and deployment of user signatures.

•Client Access Service used by the Agent and Transport Agent to fetch signature settings from the database.

•Agent for updating Outlook signatures on each user's computer.

•Transport Agent (optional) for Exchange Server for injecting signatures into emails sent from mobile devices.

The Database, Service and Client Access Service are installed with the Main Application when performing a Full Installation of Email Signature Manager.

The following steps are used to deploy signatures to the users in your organization:

•Using the Email Signature Manager Main Application, your environment is configured. This tells Email Signature Manager how Exchange is deployed across your organization, and optionally, is used to specify the service accounts that are used to update the mailboxes on Exchange Server and Office 365.
 

•Using the WYSIWYG editor, the signature templates are designed. The templates use dynamic fields and conditional statements that are evaluated during deployment to produce signatures that are specific to each user (e.g. the signature can contain for example each user's name, email address and direct dial number) but standardized across your organization.
 

•Once the templates are designed and tested, the main application is used to specify how signatures are deployed to the users in your organization. Deployment can be specified either by group membership or for individual users. The main application is also used to set certain deployment options that control how signatures are installed to Outlook on your users' computers.
 

•With signature design completed and deployment configured, the Email Signature Manager Service performs three core functions:
 

oGenerates Outlook signatures and stores them in the database, and also writes them to each user's mailbox.

oDeploys OWA signatures to each user's mailbox.

oGenerates mobile device signatures, to be injected into emails sent from mobile devices, and stores them in the database.

•The Email Signature Manager Agent runs on each user's computer to fetch the pre-generated signatures and deploy them to Outlook. The Agent normally connects to the Email Signature Manager Client Access Service to fetch the signatures, but it can also fetch them from the user's mailbox when running off domain. The Agent can be started from a network share from a logon script, or installed using for example Group Policy. Further information about the Agent can be found in this topic and about the Client Access Service in this topic.
 

•If the users in your organization use their mobile devices to send emails via your On-Premises Exchange Server, the Email Signature Manager Transport Agent is used to inject the appropriate pre-generated signatures into those emails during delivery. The Transport Agent knows where to inject the signature based on a set of rules. Further information about the Transport Agent can be found in this topic.

Note The Email Signature Manager Transport Agent can normally only be used in conjunction with On-Premises Exchange Server, although some Hosted Exchange providers may allow the Transport Agent to be installed. The Transport Agent cannot be used with Office 365, but OWA signatures will automatically work in the OWA App for Android and iOS platforms.