Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 29 Jun 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: New Email Signature Add-in

Description

Exclaimer Cloud’s Outlook Add-in product uses latest Outlook Add-ins capabilities – Event-driven Add-in with onCompose event and Mailbox 1.10 for Outlook, announced at Microsoft Build 2021. In this 15-minute all developer-focused demo, Exclaimer presenters James Wayne and Phillip Vetter step through the business problem, technology hurdles, and demo the secure, automated, cross-platform solution. User experience – mail creation triggers onCompose event, signature bloc automatically inserted based on recipient profile. This PnP Community demo is taken from the Office Add-ins community call – June 2021, recorded on June 9, 2021.

Demo Presenters:
• James Wayne (Exclaimer Cloud)
• Phillip Vetter (Exclaimer Cloud)

Supporting documents:
• Blog - Announcing the New Exclaimer Cloud Outlook Add-In | https://blog.exclaimer.com/announcing-the-new-exclaimer-cloud-outlook-add-in/
• Press Release - EXCLAIMER IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE LAUNCH OF A NEW PRODUCT FEATURE: EXCLAIMER CLOUD OUTLOOK ADD-IN | https://www.exclaimer.com/company/press-releases/2021/new-exclaimer-cloud-outlook-add-in

Stay connected:
• Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• YouTube https://aka.ms/M365DevYouTube
• Blog https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog

A

Today we invited james wayne from exclaimer who created an add-in for signatures, and I will let him share a more interesting demo about all this, so so james, if you are ready, please feel free to start presenting.

A

B

You um um let me first start by saying what a pleasure it is to be invited to uh speak to you all today, we're very grateful for the opportunity. These are exciting times, and uh my job today is to talk to you all about our new email, signature add-in for our product exclamation. Before we get into that.

B

Let me first introduce myself and the colleagues that I'm joined by my name is james and I am the head of product specialists here at exclaimer, but I'm also uh joined by my colleague, phil vetter, who is the head of our development team uh a little bit of information about exclaimer?

B

If you are unaware of who we are, um we are a sas solution provider. Primarily we sell email, signature management solutions. We have organizations around the world as I'll get to in just a moment that make use of our software to help manage their email signatures, make it far easier to do so.

B

But the thing that I am here to talk to you about today is our new email signature add-in. We announced uh on the same day that you announced the general availability of uh event-based activation, so we were right in tandem. There we've been very fortunate to work quite closely here to make this a reality.

B

So what I'd like to talk about today is just a little bit about who we are to give you some context. The customer pain points that we identified and we've done that very early on really. We had a previous way of handling email signatures within the various outlook clients, but there were some pain points regarding that, and I was talking about what those were, how we overcame those obstacles with the add-in.

B

What that has allowed us to do phil will speak a little bit about the development journey and then I do intend to show you a live demonstration of of what that add-in looks like in practice.

B

So, as I said, let's start by looking at us just for a little bit more time. We are uh exclaimer the category leader for email, signature management solutions um we have been around for now uh about uh 20 years in the market, so we do consider ourselves to be uh experts in the email, signature space, it's what we live and breathe every day, and we now provide a solution and email signature solution to over 40 000 customers, many of whom are enterprise enterprise size in the sort of tens of thousands of users.

B

We have offices around the world. Our principal one is in the uk, that's in our farnborough main office, but we also have offices uh in miami uh and as well in the netherlands, and we are growing. So that is uh good news.

B

Our principal product is a product called exclaimer cloud that can actually be used to manage signatures both for microsoft, 365, but as well, local exchange too, and what the solution really tries to deliver the value of it for our customers.

B

I really regard these three points, primarily delivering a state of consistency where the email signature is concerned, really guaranteeing that the email signatures that the organization wants users to use are used and actually accomplish this across all of the email, clients and devices that they use, make it far easier, more straightforward, quick and easy to actually design those signatures and manage them day to day make changes on the fly really use the email signature as a communications channel.

B

Certainly part of our responsibility, is making it so easy to update email signatures that anyone can be capable of doing so and then. Finally, if there are pieces of compliance that need to be considered uh making sure that those are always in place too.

B

So if we turn our attention to some of those pain points, we've been able to address with this add-in, we had previous ways of delivering email signatures to the outlook client, but there were definitely some pain points associated with that previous method. For a start, it involved a locally installed agent, which of course, is more difficult to deploy. It was deployed traditionally using gpo or in tune, and that posed challenges especially to remote users.

B

It just generated for our customers, more overhead, where the itt department was concerned and making sure that that agent that was required to deliver signatures was in place, and we wanted an easier way that we could offer and then as well. There was the experience of the end user to consider.

B

We couldn't provide a visual preview right when the selection of the signature took place. We couldn't offer multiple signatures in outlook for the web, and that meant very much a different experience in desktop outlook, the local outlook, client and the web outlet, client and as well, because of the way that behaved signatures were only updated every 60 minutes. There was a long period of time in between each update.

B

Thankfully, the add-in has allowed us to overcome several of these challenges. Certainly now we have ease of deployment because that can all be managed from the admin portal as well. The add-in, of course, will be automatically upgraded without any action. There's no upgrades to concern themselves with our customers. We can ensure a reliable signature insertion now.

B

In fact, we can as well override existing user-defined signatures support all platforms, and something really important to exclama is really that we do things properly where authentication and security uh is concerned, and now we've got this fantastic way of ensuring we can offer these extra features functionality, whilst not compromising in that regard, which is which is just great. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pass over now to philip vetter, who is our head of development and he's going to talk to you about the journey we took to reach this atom.

C

uh Thank you james. So start I'll start with I'd like to talk about really where we've come from, so we've been producing, client-side admins have been able to update outlook signatures for over 10 years now and that agent it works well, but it requires you to us to go into the file system to match the formats he's about to manipulate the registry, and we need to force outlook to do something. It didn't really want to do from the install farm kit required and the agent to run the machine.

C

So that's to install the gpo or a user interaction for that first installed. Here: click once we've looked at add-ins a number of times over the years and up until this point we couldn't really achieve that seamless, hands-off signature insertion we wanted, because what we're really after is the user doesn't have to do anything to get a signature they're just there. They appear they work completely. They can just install it, use it and forget about it and everything they want just happens.

C

So if we, if we move on to why this is now different, so in the form of the signature apis and the event-based add-ins, microsoft have given us the ability to reliably insert signatures we've given us the ability to have an add-in that works across all platforms.

C

So, as james alluded to a minute ago, we have solutions for outlook for mac. We have solutions for outlook for windows desktop and we have the solutions to outlook web, but they are different solutions for each platform.

C

This enables us to create a single user experience, a single solution that works across all platforms and will be there available when microsoft make it available on that platform. One of the other challenges we have with the adding the preview is guaranteeing that signature will be inserted. So with a new on compose event, you can automatically insert that signature into the email, so the user's not having to make it conscious choice about inserting the signature, and we can also override the user's existing signature so particularly on our web.

C

If the user's been in and created their own signature, this then allows us to enforce corporate signatures across all platforms and really continuing the theme of making sure that the user has to interact with this as little as possible, and it just works for them. The ability for to use the sso that's built into algorithms built into outlook web. You just sign them automatically into the add-ins to see their signatures automatically and automatically insert them, removes another pain point and finally, really this.

C

This is the one that helped to convince us that this was the right way to go. Microsoft have given us a clear development path with the on recipient change, events and other events they're, bringing into this add-in model that allows us to expand the functionality in parallel with microsoft, as we make these available to us and really.

C

Finally, the preview program that microsoft would run allowed us to work with the preview apis to be able to produce this add-in so that when, when microsoft were ready to go to market with it, we were there side by side and could release simultaneously.

C

So with that, I'm going to hang back to james and he'll, give you a nice demonstration. Thank.

B

You very much phil, um so, yes, it has become that time. We're going to look at how this all works and to begin with, I'm just going to show you these three email signatures and talk about the use case. I'm going to suggest here it's one we commonly encounter here. I have a default email signature for new emails. It's doing quite a lot, I'm really trying to make use of it as a communications channel with all manner of content within it.

B

I've got a default signature for forwards and replies that emits a lot of that content. As I begin to go back and forth and as well, we have that signature for internal emails too, and that we're for the time being going to need to be able to select.

B

So first, let's look at how that new email signature comes into play. uh We're here in the outlook, client, I'm going to click on new message here. The on compose event is going to trigger and that's going to result in my new email signature being added to the email, nice and easy.

B

If then, we turn our attention to replies same thing here, we're going to look at a reply message and I'm going to create my reply. Wait for that on compose event to trigger, and now my reply, signature will take effect.

B

And, finally, if we look at that choice of signature, which many of our customers do, value being able to manually select a different signature if they have need to the add-in improves this experience as well, I can simply go to the add-in below the uh the email. As I compose when I click this, it opens up the sidebar and in real time loads, so signatures. You can see all of the signatures available to me here on the right, including that new email, signature and the forwards and reply.

B

We can actually tell that these are our defaults by icons just above to the top right, here's, the icon, for my new messages. It shows that's the defaults, and here we have an icon that shows here. This is the default for replies. What I'm going to do is just click on this internal signature. It's not a default, and just by clicking on it that gets inserted instead, and that is the add-in and we are very grateful for it.

B

So I suppose, then this is a good time to invite any questions. If there are any.

D

Yeah we've got about. We've got a few minutes for some questions. So just raise your hand if you have any questions for james or phillip or for anything that uh juan was presenting around the event-based add-ins.

E

uh James uh prashanth here so I have one question: so how can we manage this signature centrally? That's.

B

A great question, so what I haven't previewed today is the portal experience that customers also have access to where all the signature designs are created. Using our proprietary signature designer tool, it's very intuitive. It makes creating signatures very, very easy. Again. We want non-it professionals, perhaps to be able to be successful at creating those signature designs themselves and from there signatures are established set up so that they appear in this add-in and are applied by the adam.

C

It's worth noting there that you.

B

C

Set up one signature centrally and then it it merges your user details into that signature, so you're not managing signatures for everyone, you're managing a single signature and then that it is automatically populated with the user details.

D

Thank you, james and philip. I really appreciate you joining the call and sharing your experience and this add-in that you've built, which is really useful for folks, taking advantage of the set signature and.

E