"Outlook for Windows: Signature cloud settings" - more detailed functionality description?

[Pawel Jarosz]

Hey Everyone,

We can see from here, that new exciting feature is about to be rolled out:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=signature

Great timing as our company is in the middle of preparing/releasing signature mechanism, question is: how it will look like as there is not much information I can find.

Currently there is one signature available in OWA, and the roadmap's tag says "Windows Desktop Outlook" and I do not get it - will all of my Outlook signatures be sinchronized to OWA? Will all my signatures configured on the server side (OWA) be visible in Outlook - so the sync will be in the other way around as well? This feature would greatly ease this particular task, as there would be no need of pushing signatures to each workstations etc. but I would like to know more about the mechanism itself, readmap says June, but as we all know date might be floating, so maybe there is no reason for us to wait and implement our mechanism. Is here someone who is in contacts with the product team and can give some heads up / sneak peak on this feature? Maybe @Julia Foran ? :)

[#2]

Well, this is just comical, maybe we will find Outlook's successor before this is released.

"Preview: September 2022
GA: October 2022"

[#3]

@GregTPACIf at least there was some reliable update on this.

[#4]

I think the issue is that they moved some tenants over to the new roaming signature before they had any way of updating the new signature through a new API. So all the vendors that made api calls using the existing api to retrieve the cloud signature on these would just get back the old OWA signature that the user could no longer update and MS have no ETA on when an API will be available to do this, if the user has been migrated to the new cloud signature - you cannot update it with the old powershell commands. MS have well and truly messed this all up andwe are left with a mess of some users/tenants stuck on the old system and some on the new! But microsoft are too busy rewriting another outlook for mac and windows from scratch that no doubt will be as bad as the new Mac outlook which has no support for public folders, imap etc... I really hate the modern approach to software development, start a new one each time and release it without feature parity and force it upon every one and then call it exactly the same name so that you can't do a google search on issues related to the new version only.

[#5]

I was wondering if anyone has accessed the preview to this or if general availability is still on track for this month. I have been asked to rollout a new signature for our company and would prefer to just do it once. However if this functionality is delayed again I will bite the bullet and roll it out using our current scripts and continue waiting for this.

[#6]

If you need access you can switch your Outlook to the Beta Channel. I am not sure but I believe that when you that your tenant will also switch to the new Roaming Signature server. You will know if that is the case if you get a dropdown in your owa signatures setting dialog, and you can make multiple signature, whereas you could only have one before.
On how to switch Outlook to the Beta channel check you search engine of choice.

[#7]

@Pawel Jarosz 

Is this the slowest roll out ever? 

Progress: |||||||||||||||||||||||||_______________ % ?

[#8]

@Stephen Black 

It's out, and guess what, it's only half cooked. You only get your standard signature synced and the rest stays on your local computer, and what is even worse, you can't select the other local signatures in Outlook anymore. I just can't get my head around why it is so hard to just sync all of the local signatures into the cloud, or if for some reason not possible, why can't I still select the local signatures in Outlook. Do all the people in charge at Microsoft only have one signature in their Outlook to choose from?

So whats left to do? Deactivate the feature. Here is the Microsoft article in how to do it:

Outlook-Roamingsignaturen - Microsoft-Support

Kind Regards

Chris

[#9]

@Christian625 

I have following issue:

We have 5 users with their own mailbox in the outlook app. They also share a mailbox. Before this roll out they were able to send mail with their own specific signature from that shared mailbox. Probably because it was locally stored. Now it seems I can only assign one signature to this shared mailbox. Other users see the signature of the user who last assigned his/her signature to this mailbox. Very annoying. Do you have any idea how to fix this? Disable this feature on all PC's from users who are impacted?

Kind regards,

[#10]

@Driekes 

I rolled it out for all of our users with help of our logon script, as we all have more than one signature.

But I suppose you could just create a new OU in "Active directory Users and Computer", move the affected users in it, and apply a new Group Policy to this new OU, which will simply start a script changing the registry key.

Here is what I did:

- I changed the registry entry on my computer and exported the key in a .reg file, deleting all the other entries but the "DisableRoamingSignatures" entry.

- Then I copied the file into the netlogon folder on the Domain Controller

- afterwards I added following line in our logon script: reg import %logonserver%\netlogon\Outlookkey.reg wheras you replace "Outlookkey.reg" with what ever you named the exported .reg key.

and done. Next time one of your user logs in, all the Signatures in Outlook will be available again, unfortunately plus the ones that got already synced into the cloud. They will show up as new Signatures as well and can just be deleted.

Cheers Chris

[#11]

Thanks Chris,
We only have 5 users with more than one signature. So I can modify there registry manually. Or do I realy need to do this via our domain controller? I'm kind of noob in this.

Kind regards,
Hendrik

[#12]

Of course, you can do this manually. You can just copy the exported .reg file onto the users computer and excecute it there. If it is just 5 users, it would be an overkill to implement the steps mentioned obove.

[#13]

I found a .reg file online. This wil only create a new key.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Setup]
"DisableRoamingSignaturesTemporaryToggle"=dword:00000001

This does not delete the other entries you mentioned previously. I will test this first before I delete other entries.

Regards,
Hendrik

[#14]

Sorry I should have made my self more clear. You are not deleting any entries in the registry, you should delete the not necessary entries in the .reg file, after the export.

[#15]

Ok. Thank you Chris. It seems to work now. Our 5 users have there own signature back on a shared mailbox.
Kind regards,

Hendrik