CodeTwo Exchange Rules

Customer Case Study

St. Catherine's School

Company description

St. Catherine's School for girls from prep to year 12 is centrally located in Toorak, Melbourne, Australia.

Problem

Email is an essential means of communication for the School between staff, students and the wider School community.

The School established a standardized corporate email signature for all staff to use and comply with for communication. However, this was a self-managed signature that required staff to setup manually in Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately this method allowed for errors, inaccurate information such as position titles and contact details. It also allowed staff to add or amend the approved standardized signature. Therefore, there was no simple method of monitoring what style and type of information in Outlook signatures was being sent to students and parents.

 

School's staff often use Outlook Web Access as well as Microsoft Outlook 2010 to communicate and were required to setup their signature twice for both systems. Some staff used iPhones and smart phones to send email also and therefore signatures on these communications were not being sent.

The other challenge was making or adding bulk changes to email signatures. The School's Marketing Department regularly advertises School events or important dates in banners attached to email. Without a centralized system to allow bulk changes, it was proving to be an impossible task to achieve.

As John Toulants, ICT Manager of St. Catherine's School, says: "Exchange 2010 Transport rules do not provide the control or flexibility to manage centralized signatures. At best you can use it to add signatures to the end of an email transcript not at the end of a reply. Also the ability to add Active Directory fields was not simple, nor was there a graphical interface to make this task simple".

Solution

The solution has been entirely described by John Toulants from St. Catherine's School:"While searching the Internet for technical support to assist with using Exchange Transport rules to manage centralized signatures, I found a number of blogs and forums that recommended CodeTwo Exchange Rules 2010. I decided to trial the software and test it against the challenges I had with Exchange Transport rules.

The installation of CodeTwo Exchange Rules 2010 was very quick and easy. It terms of file size the application is small. I am also weary of adding third party software to Microsoft Server products but this snapped in very nicely with Exchange Server.

The graphical interface is easy to use and follow. The example rules that come pre-installed make it very easy to follow and setup new rules. The accompanying signature and disclaimer editor is very easy to use and inserting Active Directory Fields was simple, and this was the selling point for me.Our School implemented CodeTwo Exchange Rules 2010 and setup a standardized centralized Outlook signature for all Staff using Active Directory fields to populate names, position titles andcontact details. The School has complete confidence that signatures in email communications are a true representation of the approved standardized signature.

Implementation was easy. We used Group Policy to disable local outlook signatures so staff did not manually need to turn off their local Outlook signatures. Then we activated the rule on CodeTwo Exchange Rules and the system was implemented.

Our Marketing Department can now easily add banners and advertisements of School events to all staff email messages. This is managed centrally and easily. Email messages sent via Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web Access or smart phones also have the standardized signature added automatically. This system also ensures that our staff details in Active Directory are accurate and up to date.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules 2010 is a handy companion to Microsoft Exchange and fills the gaps that Exchange Transport Rules does not do".

Summary

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