Email Signature Programs with Complex Data Requirements

There are three primary reasons we excel when the email signature data requirements become moderately or very complex:

• Our approach is not reliant on Active Directory for user data;
• our toolkit is large and easily expanded as needs present themselves;
• we have 18+ years of experience working with highly diverse projects and clients.

Not Reliant on Data from Active Directory

An email signature program can either be constrained by the data in your Active Directory, or it can be expanded to be what you ideally want. It’s rare that it can be both.

Because we combine a master “program-specific” database with manually imported and/or entered user-data, we do not face any constraints on the data elements to be included in an email signature project.

Following are a few examples:

Custom Data Entry Fields: We can provide custom fields to serve basically any purpose, and can label them in a way that makes them self explanatory. Below is an example of using three of these fields to include the contact information for an employees’s assistant:

Drop-Down Selections - Direct Substitution: We can provide a drop-down selection that users can use to add pre-defined text to their signatures (often used for titles or division names).

User Editable Drop-Down Substitutions: We can provide specialized values in a drop-down list that call for additional user inputs, allowing a fine degree of user personalization while still maintaining control over the general content.

Drop-Down in a Drop-Down: We can provide a nested drop-down that allows a fine degree of user personalization while still maintaining control over the general content.

Note: Our drop-down capabilities enable us to combine the various features mentioned above into a single drop down menu. That is, some selections may make a direct data substitution, some may make an indirect data substitution, some may require additional user inputs (typed) and others may trigger a nested drop-down. The result is the ability to deploy a very complicated range of choices to a user in a way that is not overly complicated and enables them to get to a good final result without much thought.

The above are for illustration purposes only. The simple truth is that if you want some data element included in your email signatures, we can facilitate it.

Expandable Toolkit

When we’re asked to provide something that we can’t accomplish with existing tools, we develop the tools. Case-in-point: Kuehne + Nagel needed the capability to apply a specific “Customer Thermometer” (satisfaction survery) to the signatures of select employees, and also had to add an internal Kuehne + Nagel Code for the employee, to create the proper tracking of the satisfaction surveys. They wanted to control the inclusion of the Customer Thermometer at an administrative level, rather than letting users self-select it. The goal was a finished email signature like this:

We proposed, and then executed, a new feature - “hidden” fields. These fields were structured such that they were invisible to users as they filled out the data entry form, but when the Kuehne + Nagel administrator logged in via our administrative interface, they could see, and hence set them, for the user.

18+ Years of experience

There’s not much we haven’t seen in the last 18 years, so when we’re presented with a set of requirements by a new client we usually know exactly how to proceed. This is done efficiently and without costly mis-steps, resulting in even the most complex email signature programs becoming easily manageable.