Templates and the library

A template is a signature design: HTML plus placeholders that are filled in per person when the signature is rendered.

Templates live in a named library. You can keep as many as you like, and each one carries its own independent version history.

Roles: which template is served

Two roles decide what people actually receive.

Role	Served for
new	New messages
reply	Replies and forwards

The template assigned to the new role is what most people mean by “the active signature”. Assigning a reply template is optional; without one, replies get the new-message template.

Reply templates are usually shorter. A full brand block on every message in a long thread gets tiresome quickly, so a name, title and phone number is a common choice.

The add-in works out which is needed. It calls getComposeTypeAsync and asks for the reply signature ("type": "reply" in the request) for a reply or a forward. The method is probed rather than assumed, so an older Outlook client that does not support it simply gets the new-message signature.

Whichever template is served, it is still personalised per person from the directory.

Changing which template is served

Assigning a role needs the assignment rules capability, which the Admin role holds and a custom role can be given. An Editor can create and publish templates but cannot change which one people receive.

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Open the menu at the end of the template’s row.
3. Under Assign role, choose Set active for new mail, or Use for replies.

The In use card at the top of the view shows the change, and the row gains an Active or Reply badge. To have replies use the new-message template again, choose Reset to same beside the reply template in the In use card.

Refining assignment

Roles set the organisation-wide default. To give different groups different signatures, add assignment rules: an ordered list of predicates that match on a directory attribute or an Entra group and name a template per role. First match wins, and anyone no rule matches falls back to the role assignment.

The Templates view

The Templates view lists the library, shows which template is active for new messages and which covers replies, and is where you create, assign, duplicate, rename, download or delete a template.

Selecting a template opens the Editor for it. A designer template opens in the designer and an HTML one in the HTML editor, so the library is the only place that shows the whole picture at once.

With signature previews, each row also carries a thumbnail after the name: the top-left corner of the live signature, at close to its own size, which is enough to tell a template from its near-identical duplicate. Clicking the thumbnail opens the whole picture. A row whose template has no picture yet simply has no thumbnail.

Badges in the library

Each entry carries badges for anything true of it that you would otherwise have to open it to find out.

Badge	What it means
Active	Served for new messages
Reply	Served for replies and forwards
Rolling out, with a percentage	A staged rollout is in flight, so part of the organisation is on a different body
Draft	An unpublished draft is sitting on it. Users still receive the published version
Awaiting review	The draft has been submitted and is waiting on an approver
Scheduled	A publish is booked for a future instant

The rollout badge leads, because a rollout is the only state in which people in the same organisation are receiving different signatures.

The Draft badge is a yes or no rather than a preview. The library deliberately never loads template bodies, since that would mean pulling a full signature per row to answer a question that fits in a badge.

The badges keep themselves current. When anyone publishes, saves a draft, starts or finishes a rollout, or books or cancels a publish, the library re-reads within a second or so, so a view left open on another screen does not go stale.

Creating a template

Creating one asks for a name and where to start from. That choice also decides which editor the template belongs to, and it is stored against the template, so the library always opens it in the editor it was authored in.

Start from	Opens in	What you get
Starter signature	Designer	The same ready-made design new organisations get
Blank canvas	Designer	Nothing at all
From your website	Designer	The starter, with your logo, brand colour, address, social profiles and legal page read off your public website
HTML editor	HTML editor	The default signature’s markup

Creating a template needs the templates capability (the Admin and Editor roles, or a custom role that includes it) and a desktop browser; on a phone the portal says so rather than opening the dialog.

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Choose New template.
3. Enter a Template name.
4. Under Start from, pick Starter signature, Blank canvas or HTML editor.
5. Choose Create in designer, or Create in HTML editor for the HTML choice.

The template opens in the editor you chose. Nobody receives it until you publish it and assign it a role. From your website has a longer flow, described below.

The starter and the default markup are meant to be edited or cleared rather than kept. They are there so the first thing you see is a working signature to change instead of an empty canvas. Both carry the same two placeholders as the seed, so a template started from either needs the same edit before it is published.

A blank canvas left empty is a signature that renders nothing. Occasionally that is the point: assigned to a mailbox, it lets the mailbox send without a signature while it stays served and on the seat count. A blank canvas is created with campaign banners switched off, so it really does send nothing while a campaign is running. The compliance footer is another matter: it still applies to a blank canvas until somebody with the Compliance footers capability turns it off for that signature, and the New template dialog says so.

The drag-and-drop designer edits a block tree and compiles to email-safe HTML when you publish. It suits people who do not want to write markup. It is the recommended choice and the one the dialog offers first.

The HTML editor edits that markup directly, with placeholder autocomplete. It suits hand-authored templates and exact control, which is what you usually want when recreating an existing signature from another product.

A designer template can be ejected to HTML through the API, which is a one-way move with no button in the portal. See ejecting to HTML. HTML cannot be pulled back into the designer, because visual authoring is the designer’s job and reverse-engineering arbitrary markup into blocks would produce something neither faithful nor editable.

Starting from your website

Turning the starter into your own signature usually means finding the logo file, the brand colour, the registered address and the social profile links, then putting each one in by hand. Most organisations already publish all of those on their website, in places a browser reads them from. From your website reads them from there.

Type the site’s address, such as example.com, and choose Look up. Sigil fetches the page and shows what it found:

Finding	Where it comes from
Logo	The logo the site declares for itself, or failing that its touch icon or its largest PNG icon. A large page image is used only when the site declares nothing else
Brand colour	The theme colour the site declares for browsers
Address	The postal address in the site’s structured data
Social profiles	Links to your profiles on networks the designer has an icon for
Legal page	The first link that reads as a disclaimer page, or failing that a legal, privacy or terms page, in that order

Nothing has been created at this point. Each finding has a Leave out button, and social profiles can be dropped one at a time. Creating the template stores the logo in your image library and opens the result in the designer, where it behaves like any other template.

The whole flow, from the library:

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Choose New template.
3. Under Start from, pick From your website, then choose Next.
4. Enter your Website address and choose Look up.
5. On What we found, choose Leave out on anything you do not want, and drop any social profile you do not want.
6. Check the Template name. It is filled in from the site’s name if you left it blank.
7. Choose Create in designer.

Back goes a step backwards at any point without creating anything.

What changes in the starter

The logo goes at the top, scaled to fit within 180 by 80 pixels with its proportions kept, and with your organisation’s name as its alt text.

The brand colour replaces the starter’s own colour wherever it appears, which covers the name, the labels and the links.

The address line becomes your organisation’s address as written, rather than each person’s office from the directory. It also stops disappearing for people with no city on record.

A row of social icons is added, one per profile you kept.

Both placeholders are dealt with. The postmaster@ address takes your website’s domain, and the legal line points at the page that was found. Where no legal page was found, the line is removed rather than left pointing at Contoso.

Everything that differs per person, such as names, job titles, phone numbers and the Teams link, still comes from your directory, exactly as in the starter.

What it will not do

It only reads what a site declares. A site that states no theme colour gets no colour, because guessing one from the logo’s pixels goes wrong on any logo with a white background.

A colour too pale to read against white is shown with a warning, and the design keeps the starter’s text colour. A pale brand colour painted onto somebody’s name is exactly the result to avoid.

The logo has to be a PNG or JPEG, at least 32 pixels wide and under 1 MB, which are the same rules an upload follows. An SVG logo is passed over because Outlook does not render one. Where the site offers nothing usable, the template is created without a logo and you can add one in the designer.

If your library already holds an image with the same name as the logo, the logo is stored under a numbered name such as logo-2.png, and the existing image is left alone.

Only a public website address is accepted. An IP address, a single-word intranet name, or an internal suffix such as .local is refused with a message saying it does not look like a public website. A site that does not answer, or answers with an error, is reported as such.

What was found is kept nowhere except in the template it created. Looking the site up again reads it again.

Duplicating, renaming and deleting

Duplicating copies a template into a new library entry, which is the usual way to create a variant for one department without risking the original.

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Open the menu at the end of the template’s row.
3. Choose Duplicate.
4. Enter a Name for the copy and choose Duplicate.

The copy appears in the library as its own entry, with no role assigned. It keeps the original’s campaign banner switch, but starts with the compliance footer on even if the original had it off.

Renaming affects the library entry only. Nothing that references the template breaks.

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Open the menu at the end of the template’s row.
3. Choose Rename.
4. Enter the new Template name and choose Rename.

Deleting is blocked while a template is assigned to a role or referenced by an assignment rule. Reassign first.

1. Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
2. Open the menu at the end of the template’s row.
3. Choose Delete.
4. Choose Delete in the confirmation.

Delete is missing from the menu while the template carries the Active or Reply badge. A template an assignment rule still uses is refused with a message naming the rule.

A deleted template goes to Recently deleted rather than disappearing. It keeps its full version history and can be restored for 30 days. See versions and rollback.

Previewing

Preview renders the template with sample data so you can see the shape of it without publishing. It is the fastest way to check that a conditional section collapses the way you expect.

The address box above the preview swaps the sample data for a real mailbox. Start typing a name and it completes from your directory. Clear it to go back to sample data.

The sample person is invented, and so is everything beside them. The telephone numbers come from the ranges Ofcom reserves for drama, which connect to nobody, so nothing in a preview points at a real mailbox or a real phone.

To see a real person’s real signature, use the download option on the Templates view, which produces the live signature for a chosen mailbox as a standalone HTML file. To see it in a real mail client, send a test email.

Previewing a shared mailbox send

A second address box sits beside the first, labelled “sent by”. It renders the template as if that person had sent from the mailbox named in the first box, which is how you check a signature using the sender placeholders. Leaving it blank gives you the ordinary send, where the mailbox is sending for itself. Both editors have it. See sending on behalf of a mailbox.

Put sales@ in the first box and a colleague’s address in the second, and the preview shows what a delegate’s message from the shared mailbox will actually say, including whether the {{#onBehalfOf}} clause opens.

Naming somebody who is not a delegate does nothing visible. The preview applies the same test a real send does, so it cannot show you an output no message could produce. Somebody previewing themselves against their own mailbox, or against one of their own aliases, gets the ordinary send.

The starter template

New tenants are seeded with a ready-made design rather than a blank page. It is editable like any other template, and replacing it is expected.

The Getting started checklist treats “publish a signature” as complete when the active template is no longer the seed, so swapping it out is what marks that step done.

Two things in it are placeholders

Everything in the seed that names a person or a mailbox is filled from your own directory when it renders. Two things cannot be, because no directory attribute holds them, and both sit in the small print at the bottom:

Placeholder	What it should become
postmaster@contoso.com	Wherever you want misdirected mail reported
contoso.com/email-disclaimer	Your own legal or disclaimer page, or nothing at all

They are obviously not yours on purpose. Contoso is a fictitious company, and a seeded signature that pointed your recipients somewhere plausible but wrong would be worse than one that visibly asks to be edited. Publish the seed unchanged and every message you send asks its recipients to report misdirected mail to a company nobody at your organisation reads.

Both are ordinary text in the template, so change them in whichever editor you are using, or delete the disclaimer block if your organisation does not want one.

Publishing

Editing does not affect anyone until you publish. Each template can hold one unpublished draft, and the HTML editor shows a line diff against the live version before you commit.

Publishing increments the template’s version, which strands every cached signature for it. Changes reach users within seconds, and there is nothing to purge.