Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 15 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: CodeTwo Outlook Add-in for email signature management

Description

In this 14-minute Developer-focused demo, Michał Królewicz - Microsoft Gold Partner from CodeTwo demonstrates their email signature manager Outlook Web add-in product that leverages Microsoft Event based add-in capabilities recently released at Microsoft Ignite 2021. CodeTwo’s product allows Admins to centrally manage email signatures and legal disclaimers on mails sent to internal and external recipients. Client-side and server-side (Cloud) capabilities including preview are available across all Office 365 devices. Code sample in Github. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Office Add-ins community call – November 2021, recorded on November 10, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Michał Królewicz (CodeTwo)

Supporting documents:
• Website - www.codetwo.com | www.codetwo.com
• Blog - What’s new for Office Add-ins at Ignite 2021 | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/whats-new-for-office-add-ins-at-ignite-2021/
• Blog - CodeTwo Squad Blog | https://www.codetwo.com/blog/outlook-add-in-new-features-ignite-2021/
• Sample – Sample signatures add-in | https://github.com/CodeTwoDev/sample-signatures-addin

Stay connected:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos

A

Hi everyone I'm the first michael presenting here today. I'm gonna talk to you about uh some new, exciting features that microsoft released to their outlook web adding api last week at microsoft, ignite and we've actually already implemented those features to our signatures. Outlook web add-in.

A

For those of you who don't know code 2, we are just, as david said, microsoft's partner. We are an independent software vendor from poland, europe and for over 14 years, we've been developing software solutions for microsoft, 365 exchange, formerly also for outlook, and what we do is uh we help organization administrators manage centrally managed email signatures, legal disclaimers and branding.

A

We held them with data migration to microsoft cloud and we have cloud backup and currently more than 100 000 companies worldwide use our software, including facebook or samsung, and today I'm going to talk about our flagship product, which is code to email, signatures for office 365, and it's uh it's basically an email, signature manager uh which allows an organization like one person, an admin or delegated people like marketing, guys to centrally manage email, signatures, legal disclaimers, marketing campaigns and automate them in a few clicks and a key feature of this solution.

A

That is that it supports all email, apps and devices, and it's because it can work in two modes. uh One mode: is you get the signature as you type an email in outlook and outlook on the web, and the second mode adds signatures in the cloud. So for those of you who are not familiar with email, signature software principles, uh let me summarize how it works so that the first mode, the cloud mode it works like this, when a user sends an email from any email, app or device.

A

As long as it's hooked up to their microsoft, 365 email account. This email goes through a microsoft, 365 tenant, that's how it works normally, but what we do here is we have a cloud service in the same microsoft, azure data center as the customer tenants to ensure full security so that your data never leaves microsoft data center and we add the signature using our service and then the email with a signature is delivered to recipients.

A

So when a user types, their email that they do not get the signature, it's added in the cloud later on and the second like more traditional mode- is that you get signatures directly in outlook as you type and it uses modern signatures web add-in for outlook. So the add-in adds your signature. Then the email goes through your microsoft, 365, tenant and then to recipients. So it's like a traditional way and uh actually with some of the news, uh microsoft release last week at their uh outlook web add-in api.

A

They changed a lot for us for the signature, vendors and so we're focused on our signatures web, adding for outlook which can actually thanks to those uh recent events that microsoft introduced it can handle both of these modes. So both outlook modes and the cloud mode I've been working closely with microsoft to first release this outlook modern web add-in. Last year at microsoft, ignite we were proud to be the world's first signature vendor to to release the adding that supports both outlook, desktop and outlook on the web, but well, let's see it in action.

A

So, first of all, let me show you how the signature management interface looks like. So, if you are an admin or a person responsible to manage signatures in your organizations, you can use the simple web user interface to manage your signatures or actually signature rules, because they include several different conditions that help you automate how signatures are added. So we've got both cloud or server side. That's the former name signatures here and also client-side signatures, which will be added directly in outlook.

A

Let's start with those outlook signatures, so we've prepared a sample, microsoft, 365, tenant, that's got three signatures: free client-side signatures and internal uh for internal users and external and then optional. uh Let's see how the signature is created or is edited so it's got you can create uh you. Can you need to give a name to your signature, that's kind of obvious and you can specify senders who will get the signatures?

A

Of course, these need to be the users who have the modern outlook web adding deployed. Well. Actually, what microsoft gave us here with their modern outlook web adding technology is the deployment is much easier than before, because an admin can deploy the add-in for the whole organization and users do not need to install anything. It just uh automatically appears in their outlook account.

A

So we can select senders. Who will get this signature? You can select all senders like specific users or use even an advanced actives that actually filter to add signatures, for example, only to your managers and the new thing here that microsoft new events released last week, which is called on message, recipients change events, helps us also automatically automatically change and add email signatures based on recipients. So we can define those recipients as internal recipients, external recipients, any recipients we can even provide specific email addresses and the add-in will automatically detect.

A

You can schedule uh if signature should be active all the time or for specific time frames only. We can also uh set up signature behavior uh with outlook if it should be added automatically as default for new messages, replies and forwards. And finally, the signature needs to be designed using a simple. What you see is what you get editor.

A

What might be interesting for you is that the signature template is actually composed of placeholders, and these placeholders would will be automatically replaced with senders details like first name last name, job, title, etc when the signature is added to outlook okay. So what we have here is we have three signatures: a simple internal signature for intel emails, an external signature with like more contact details with legal disclaimers and an optional signature. So let's see how it works in outlook with our modern web outlook, add-in installed.

A

So when the user creates a new email boom, their signature automatically appears. So what happened here is that an on new message compose event released last year by microsoft in the router web add-in api was triggered and it added a signature and what's new here, is this new event released last week and it's called on message: recipients, change events, and it works like this that it reacts to the email recipients you type here since we added an internal recipient. Adele is also from my organization.

A

The event was triggered, but nothing changed here right, but when I type, let's say an external user, the second signature, let me show you once more here, so the external signature, the one with more details, was automatically added here to my email and if a user wants to preview signatures available to them, they can just simply launch the the add-in pane to see these are the signatures based on the recipients.

A

You currently selected in your message, so the external signature, which was automatically selected and added to email and an optional signature which was set up by your admin. You can also just use this signature instead, so, as you can see, it's pretty responsive and dynamic.

A

So this is basically how how these uh outlook signatures work. What might be a disadvantage for some organizations is that you can tamper with your signatures, so a user can delete some elements and send an email without their photo. For example, that's why a lot of organizations prefer those cloud signatures, and we also want to show you that this modern outlook web adding can also support uh these cloud signatures.

A

So we prepared an external signature template for another user and see how it, let's see how it works, like that's another microsoft, 365 user in the same organization. So let's say christy prepares a new email and she selects any recipients.

A

Nothing changes here. Why is that? Because this is the cloud signature mode, so christie's signature will be actually added in the cloud with the modern outlook web add-in, we can preview the cloud signatures actually by opening the encode signatures pane.

A

So, let's add an external another external user here from poland, so uh christy can preview server, side or cloud signatures, so they will be added later to their email. These signatures will also be added if christy uses another device like her smartphone, because this mode adds signatures in the cloud. So all devices are supported.

A

uh What's uh also pretty interesting, that this feature this this mode, uh if you use koto software, also get a nice feature that allows recipients to get different signatures. So when this email is sent, megan will see this signature and another external user will get and see this signature in the same message: pretty neat right: okay, so that's basically uh how these two modes are handled uh using the new events, uh basically, the on message: recipients change event released by microsoft, and just so you don't get bored and can try it yourself.

A

We prepared a simple, simple add-in sample like an example adding that adds signatures so we'll provide a link to our github account in the chat window in a moment after the meeting, and so let me explain how this works so, the code you can check later on, it's pretty simply just 56 lines of code and we prepared the sample in such a way that we've got two elements here: a signature and disclaimer.

A

These are static elements and the disclaimer, so they do not change dynamically or anything like this. It's just a sample signature we got here and uh the adding can actually or the sample add-in we prepared can actually load those signatures uh into outlook's session data object. That's also actually a new thing here, because microsoft's outlook, adding team released this session data object also a week ago at microsoft, ignite, okay, so let's check yet another user has got this simple sample code, adding deployed.

A

So when you select an internal recipient once again, the on message, recipients, change event is called and it adds the signature. But when you type an external user.

A

The event once again is triggered and it adds the disclaimer. So it's a pretty simple sample, but you can check how this event-based activation and how these new events released by microsoft's uh work yourself. So that will be all on my part. If you want to contact me directly, just go ahead and we encourage you to check our products and if you've got any questions, just type them in the chat window. We've got a few developers here with us who will be able to answer like more technical questions, because I'm the marketing manager here.

A

Okay, thanks a lot for listening guys over to you, david.

B

All right, thank you, michael, that is very cool, to see it's very interesting to see or how you can coordinate uh between, like what the admin wants to control and users being able to see and have some flexibility, depending on how everything's set up it's uh pretty neat, to see how that's managed and thanks for sharing the code sample, I think that'll be super useful to people who want to try it out and kind of see how that works.

B

I'll also add you know in our blog summary that comes out in a couple of weeks, we'll we'll put in some more links to related information around all of that, so you can kind of go, dig around through documentation and related samples as well, if you want to so. Thank you very much.