Editing and Creating Templates

A template is actually a set of 3 templates.

In Outlook you can choose to send mail in 3 formats, namely RTF, Text and HTML.

When you open a Template in DS Manager you will get 3 Tabbed Panels so you can edit all three templates at same time.

In DynamicSignature the format of a placeholder for information from Active Directory has the form ###FIELD###. That is also called a Mark-up.

There is a little over 70 fields available to you in the DS Manager. You will notice that if you go to the "Users & Computers" MMC snap in and look at a normal users properties you cannot see 60 fields. That is because AD has quite a lot of auxiliary fields that most administrators are not aware of.

Microsoft has design the AD schema with some very large customers in mind. But for the ordinary company only a fraction of these fields is necessary, so they have hidden them, so to speak.

So how do large companies use these fields if they are "hidden". Well the answer is that they do not user MMC console to edit users. They have application pulling data from large HR systems to synchronize information across. Also called fire & hire applications, or Identity Integration Services. So they access these fields programmatically.

If you would like to look at the fields available you can use the ADSIEdit.msc Snap-in. That is a part of the Support Tools on the Windows Server installation CD. (Found in the folder named Support)

Thread carefully in there, because you are looking directly at the AD Schema, and you can cause a lot of damage, just like in the Registry Editor.

Our Companion Product DynamicDirectory reflects these same 70 Fields. So you get an interface to actually start using all the auxiliary fields.

Those are field like Employee ID, Car License, and Division etc.

Content Limitations

There are a few limitations to what you can actually put into your templates. They are limitation that springs from experience more than from technicalities.

The HTML format:

You can of course put pictures. They will get transformed to MIME: Base64 embedded images, so they will not show up as attachments as many have problems with, because it pollutes the end users view of mails with real attachments. You often find yourself looking for a mail with an attachment, and it is quite annoying to say the least if a lot of the mails show the attachment clip, and it is because there is an image in the mail.

Outlook does all the encoding as a built-in feature. It is NOT the DS Client that does that.

Microsoft made this encoding a feature in Outlook at some point in Office 2002 (A.k.a. Office XP) and that was only when you had set up Word as editor. If you did not have that setting, images became attachment. That was fixed in Outlook 2003.

But Outlook does NOT support the full html standard. In fact it only supports a rather reduced set of html instruction. That is important to understand.

In Outlook prior to 2007 the rendering engine was the Internet Explorer. But in Outlook 2007 Microsoft has switched to Word. And Word has got an even more reduced instruction set.

The DS Manager Html Editor has been created so it only produces HMTL that is actually supported by Outlook.

It is possible to paste html source code into the editor, so you can work on the html in an external editor like Dreamweaver. But please appreciate that you can then introduce html to Outlook that is not supported, and therefore not work well.

A good example of this reduced instruction set is that there is no ways you can make Outlook show a background image, which is a very common thing in html. It simply ignores all background images.

The RTF Format

The RTF format accepts tables and images. It also supports font setting and colors.

But tables do not work well. So don't use tables.

The reason is that while it looks fine when you sent the RTF formatted mails around to your colleagues, it looks just fine. But the minute you send it to someone on the internet Exchange will convert the RTF format to html. And this translation is very poor. It will strip all the tables and you end up with a signature that is garbled up.

The Text Format

In the text format you can only have plain text, with no formatting at all. Not colors and images, just plain text.

Controlling what signatures are used

You can choose in Outlook settings what format you want to use when you write email. Outlook will then automatically choose the corresponding signature format.

If you reply to an email to format of this email will dictate what format is used automatically. So if you reply to an email that was originally sent to you in text format, the reply will also be in text, under the assumption that the sending client does not have the html capabilities.