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 requests type=reply 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.

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.

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Draft	An unpublished draft is sitting on it.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.

Creating a template

Creating one asks for a name and which editor to build it in. The choice is made at that point and is stored against the template, so the library always opens it in the editor it was authored in.

Neither editor starts you on a blank page. A designer template is seeded with the same ready-made design new organisations get, and an HTML template is seeded with the equivalent markup. Both are meant to be edited or cleared rather than kept, and they are there so the first thing you see is a working signature to change instead of an empty canvas. Both also carry the same two placeholders as the seed, so a new template needs the same edit before it is published.

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, which is a one-way move. 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.

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.

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

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

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, with no redeploy and nothing to purge.