There’s been some great news from Microsoft overnight.
Who hasn’t had an occasion when a user gets in touch with your Service Desk because they’ve received a new machine and they’ve forgotten how to create a signature in Outlook?
Microsoft have revealed the release dates for when Outlook will finally store user signatures in the cloud so that a user doesn’t lose their configured signature(s) in the event of a disk failure or serious profile corruption.
Outlook for Windows is introducing e-mail signatures that will be stored in the cloud rather than being stored locally on the user’s Windows device.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 60371
When this will happen
We will begin rolling this out to Microsoft 365 Monthly Channel, Targeted, in late July. (This is Insiders Slow Channel which will soon be called Microsoft Beta.)
We expect to roll this out to the Monthly Channel, Production, in late August.
How this will affect your organization
The feature is on by default.
Traditionally, signatures were stored locally on a user’s Windows device. With this feature, signatures will now be associated with an email account.
Signatures will be stored in the user mailbox and will be available on any devices running Outlook for Windows that has been configured with that email account.
When the feature becomes available, Outlook will read the existing local signatures. Outlook will copy signatures selected as default for New messages or Replies/forwards to the account mailbox, making them available across multiple devices.
What you need to do to prepare
The feature is on by default.
Because this new feature is changing how Outlook manages signatures stored on a local drive, third-party add-ins which provided this functionality will no longer work when this feature is enabled. Learn how to mitigate this for your users.
Get started with group policy templates.
Review Outlook roaming signatures options
This is fantastic news, and hopefully this new functionality for Outlook will follow on other platforms shortly.
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Chris
With over 20 years of working in the IT industry, I have a wide experience of many different areas of Information Technology and have specific interests in Cloud Solutions, Windows, Active Directory, and Infrastructure. I'm by no means a coder or programmer, and any snippets I post here work fine in my environment, but I give no assurances to how they may work for you.