Generate an Outlook Signature with VB.Net

Question

Recently I've been tasked with standardizing the company signature for all employees. Outlook 2003/2007/2010 and figured in place of manually typing in and making changes for 200 employee's, it would make more sense to pull the data from our Active Directory and generate the signatures.

Getting in the info is easy.

Assigning the newly generated signature as the default is not. How can I tell Outlook to use the newly generated default signature?

For the HTML signature, can I use standard HTML or do I need to keep all of that Word HTML garbage?

Answer 1

How are you deploying the signature, a login script?

You can set the default signature in the registry, there're many guides on this on google. Under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0/12.0/14.0\Common\MailSettings

Make an expanded string called NewSignature and assign the value of the signatures name. To set the reply/forward signature you create an expanded string named ReplySignature

You can also think about using GPOs to make these registry changes, also there's an existing policy were you can choose what the signature should be standardlized in, HTML/RTF or TXT. This can also be set using the registry.