Manage auto reply messages with CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 (Microsoft 365)

CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 provides centralized management for email signatures in Microsoft 365 and has recently added a new auto reply feature.

Contents

What is CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365?
- CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 features
Signing up for CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365
Configure a new Autoresponder
Examples of auto reply messages
Wrapping up and impressions

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Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee has been in the IT industry 15+ years and focuses on networking and virtualization. He contributes to the community through various blog posts and technical documentation primarily at Virtualizationhowto.com.

What is CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365?

CodeTwo Email Signatures is a cloud-based solution where email signatures are added in the cloud after a message is sent or directly in Outlook and OWA, as users type the email using a web-based add-in). In addition, CodeTwo has worked closely with Microsoft on engineering its Office 365 solution, touting on its site that it is the only email signature solution certified by Microsoft.

The solution is feature-rich and provides capabilities you won't see as part of native email signature capabilities in modern email clients. In addition, the new Autoresponder feature adds a fully customizable, centrally managed auto reply solution for customers at no additional cost.

CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 features

Note the following capabilities offered with CodeTwo Email Signatures:

Centrally managed email signatures—Rather than having users create and manage their own email signatures, CodeTwo provides centralized management to ensure a unified, centralized approach to email signatures.
Full control over when and where Office 365 email signatures & auto replies are added—You can define which signatures are sent to internal and external recipients based on factors such as the sender, recipient, language groups, and Azure AD user attributes.
Manage autoresponder emails for your organization—Create rules that generate intelligent auto replies for groups or individual users in your organization.
It supports all clients and mobile devices—CodeTwo states that their solution is compatible with nearly every mobile device and client, allowing it to add signatures to both.
It features an HTML signature template editor—CodeTwo helps to ease the burden of needing to know HTML coding. It comes with predeveloped templates and layouts that allow you to quickly roll out professional signatures for your organization. It also includes a web HTML editor with a WYSIWYG experience, allowing easy tweaks and customizations.
You can easily add logos, banners, and social media buttons in signatures—It allows businesses to capitalize on the untapped potential of the email signature for marketing purposes. You can add images, banners, social media buttons, and other media.
Azure AD integration and support—CodeTwo helps unlock the power of Azure Active Directory with email signatures. Since Office 365 is built on top of Azure AD, it makes sense to pull from Azure AD for user details. CodeTwo provides placeholders to personalize email signatures with information pulled from Azure AD. You can also add conditional placeholders to add custom email signature elements and manage all attributes independent of your Azure AD, using a separate interface.
Use Microsoft 365 photos in signatures—CodeTwo can also pull users' photos from Microsoft 365 and use these as part of the signature.
Add signatures in forwards and replies—Organizations can choose to add different signatures to replies and forwards in addition to the bottom of the initial message.
Leverage email signatures for marketing opportunities—CodeTwo can track user engagement with the URLs and other information contained in the email signature. It enables using URL tagging to track the results of marketing campaigns in analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.
Use signatures for customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys—Businesses can add personalized one-click customer satisfaction surveys to email signatures, helping to analyze customer satisfaction.

Signing up for CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365

CodeTwo offers a free 14-day trial of Email Signatures for Office 365. Click the Free Trial link on their page and complete the signup process. The signup process for CodeTwo Email Signatures is seamless and easy, using the same cloud-based OAuth process used to integrate most other solutions.

Accepting the permission request for the CodeTwo Email Signatures Office 365 integration

After accepting the terms and conditions of enrollment, you can add a new Microsoft 365 tenant by clicking the "+" in the Tenants section.

Adding a new tenant with CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365

This will launch the Adding new tenant wizard. First, accept the EULA.

Accept the EULA for CodeTwo Email Signatures

Next, you will be prompted to sign in once again with your Microsoft account.

After signing in, click the Add New Tenant option.

Add a new tenant in CodeTwo Email Signatures

Select the region where you want to use the CodeTwo Email Signatures service.

Choose the region for your settings and cloud processing

On the Signature mode page, you can define how you want the signature to be added in your organization. The options are:

Server-side (cloud) mode—This mode works with all email clients and requires additional configuration of Exchange Online connectors.
Client-side (Outlook) mode—Works only with the Outlook client. A signature is added as you type an email and does not require any additional setup of Exchange Online connectors.
Combo mode—Uses a combination of server-side and client-side modes.

Choose your signature mode

Finally, we are ready to provision the new CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365.

Tenant begins provisioning

I reviewed the email signature functionality some time ago, so now let's take a closer look at the new Autoresponder functionality and see how companies can use this new feature.

Configure a new Autoresponder

Creating a new CodeTwo Autoresponder rule is quick and easy, following the CodeTwo wizardized workflow. The Autoresponder is a free feature.. To turn it on, just navigate to the Autoresponder option under the Admin menu, and click Turn on.

Turn on the autoresponder option under admin options

Next, you can create a new Autoresponder rule using the CodeTwo wizard. Navigate to Signatures and select the Autoresponders option.

Creating a new Autoresponder rule

After choosing to create a new Autoresponder rule, the first screen has you name the rule and set a description.

Name the rule and add a description

Next, you can configure whether you want the auto reply sent only when specific users receive emails.

Auto reply when specific users receive emails and set up exceptions

You can also configure who you want the autoreplies sent to.

Select who you want the auto replies to be sent to

Another excellent option you can configure is sending autoreplies using keywords. You can choose only to send autoreplies based on specific keywords in the email messages. You can also configure inverse logic to avoid sending replies if certain keywords are found.

Auto reply based on specific keywords

You can also use the scheduler option to send autoreplies only during a specific time or range.

Auto reply based on a scheduler

You can also limit the number of replies to send using the Autoresponder.

Limit the number of auto replies sent

CodeTwo allows you to build out workflows and logic where you can trigger other rules based on whether rules are processed.

Process additional rules based on the auto reply trigger

In the Design step, you can design the auto reply, including the from, to, subject, behavior, and reply message. If you click Edit reply message, you will be taken to the template chooser, allowing you to choose a prebuilt template to use with the auto reply message.

Create the new Autoresponder and edit the look and feel of the message

When you click the Edit reply message button, you can customize the auto-reply message to suite your needs.

Customizing the auto reply message in the CodeTwo Quick Customization tool

Examples of auto reply messages

A common use case for a customized auto-reply message is for a customer support team or any team that fields multiple queries using a ticketing system or other means. Using the process described above, you can create simple and easy auto-reply messages to respond quickly to customers with relevant information. Note the following example of an auto reply message for a customer support email address.

CodeTwo auto reply message example for customer support team

CodeTwo can even create auto reply messages for disabled or deleted users whose email address no longer works. Admins can easily setup auto reply messages for these inboxes to quickly send replies back to customers or other end-users, alerting them of the address change. It helps to maintain engagement with customers and end-users and improves overall user satisfaction.

CodeTwo auto replies for email accounts that no longer exist or are disabled

Wrapping up and impressions

The new Autoresponder available as a free feature in CodeTwo’s cloud email signature service will allow organizations to further extend centralized management of Office 365 email by defining organization-wide auto reply messages to align with business, compliance, and other requirements.