topic Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way? in Peer-Peer Topics

Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Justin_W — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:36:07 GMT

Hello all,

We currently use Bettercloud to set our email signatures for users in GMail.

We also used GCDS to sync our on-prem AD to GWorkspace.

Anyhow, that mostly works fine. Took some tweaking to also insert our company logo (a png file in Drive) but we've got the formatting and layout at an acceptable level as requested by our marketing department.

However, we've not been able to resolve a specific issue:

Certain users want additional info in their signature - relating to names/titles.

Examples : Middle initial, Professional title (Dr., Prof. etc) and suffix (II, IV, etc).

So what is now "John Doe" may prefer to be "Dr. John B Doe, III"

We could add those things to our AD ( we don't currently..) but either way, I'm not see those in Google anyway.

In my user's directory, the "User Information" page doesn't have any of that data (unless you wanted to consider "Doctor" as your ""Job Title" which still wouldn't work as we need)

So before I tell my marketing director that the ability to do this simply doesn't exist, I want to make sure I'm not missing something.

Along with the other things I believe to be true:

We can't stop/prevent users from editing their own signature.
If they edit their signature (assuming #1 above is true), those edits are lost when we re-apply our standard signature. (This includes approved changes like adding middle name or other titles as mentioned above)
No signature shows up if they are using a mobile device to send mail. (Odd to me since the signature is added/configured at the account/domain level, not at the device/application level)

It's all still a bit surprising and disappointing to me that the whole "signature" part is all but completely absent from Workspace admin, given how common signatures are (especially in the corp world).

Do I have that right? Anyone have a solution? Or can I put this one to rest with a "that's not technically possible"?

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Kim_Nilsson — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:27:28 GMT

#3 used to work in the Gmail app on iOS devices. It doesn't anymore. 😞

There's no good reason why it shouldn't work on both Android and iOS, whenever a user doesn't have a manually set signature on their phone, so do give Google feedback on this. They removed a feature that worked. Not ok.

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Kim_Nilsson — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:28:25 GMT

You can't control both #1 and #2. You have to pick one.

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Kim_Nilsson — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:29:58 GMT

Also, you can't really control #1 at all. 🙂

Either users have signatures or they don't. You can't block the setting or ability to create a new or change an existing signature.

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Kim_Nilsson — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:32:06 GMT

To fix #2 you don't push updates to people's signatures after it has been created for each new user, and then, of course, the users themselves are responsible for keeping it updated.

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Justin_W — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:33:13 GMT

Thanks, that's what I thought but wanted to confirm.

Also disappointing .

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Justin_W — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:34:29 GMT

Heh, well, yeah. That's more a workaround than a fix, but I get what you're saying.

It'd be nice to have control that allow for updating field but leaving anything that has been modified. There are times where both options make sense.

Re: Gmail Signatures - Better way?

Justin_W — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:35:26 GMT

Agreed.

#2 is already assuming #1 to be accurate. I'll see if I can edit it for clarity.