Multivalue AD attributes are not displayed in email signatures

Problem:

Your email signature contains a placeholder with a multivalue AD attribute (e.g. Description, otherTelephone, otherHomePhone, postOfficeBox, etc.). This placeholder is not filled with information from your Active Directory. As a result, you end up having an empty field in your signature layout.

Solution:

This issue is related to Entra ID (Azure AD) only – it's not connected to our software. Although it is possible to sync multivalue attributes from an on-premises Active Directory, currently there is no way to use them either across Microsoft 365 (as stated in this Microsoft's article) or by any third-party applications. Microsoft does not share information if and when there will be a fix to support multivalue attributes. There is no official solution as of now.

If you are having this problem, we recommend that you use only single-value AD attributes as placeholders in your email signatures (learn how to check if an attribute is a single-value one) or check out this workaround that uses our Attributes manager. 

How to check if an AD attribute is single- or multivalued

To check if an Active Directory attribute is single-valued or multivalued, you need to:

1. Find your attribute on this page and click it.
2. Navigate to the table dedicated to your version (implementation) of Exchange Server and check the value in the Is-Single-Valued row.
3. If the value is True (Fig. 1.), then you have a single-value attribute supported by CodeTwo Email Signatures 365.

Fig. 1. Checking if an AD attribute is single-valued.

Use custom attribute to replace multi-valued one

If, for whatever reason, you need to stick to a multi-value AD attribute which stores a single value for each user, you can use CodeTwo’s Attributes manager to create a new custom attribute that you will be able to use instead. This custom attribute will be available in signatures, disclaimers and auto-replies only, and will not affect your Entra ID (Azure AD) nor Active Directory. Proceed as follows:

1. Sign in to the manager at attributes.codetwo.com with your Microsoft 365 global admin account.
2. Create a custom attribute that will replace your multi-valued AD attribute, e.g. if you currently use the otherTelephone multi-value attribute, you need to create one new custom attribute, as highlighted here.
3. Next, go to the Import/Export tab and export the CSV file from the manager, according to these instructions (Fig. 2.).

Fig. 2. Exporting the CSV file for bulk editing.

4. Open the CSV file and add UPNs of all the users for whom the newly created custom attribute will be used in signatures, disclaimers, or auto-replies. Next, bulk update the attribute's column with appropriate data from your AD. The column is located after all the standard attributes such as Display name or Last name, so it's a good idea to temporarily hide most of columns to be able to see corresponding user's UPN when editing values (Fig. 3.).

   Tips

   If the volume of your AD data is quite big, you can bulk export it by following these instructions.

   Instead of updating the attributes in bulk, you can also ask your users to update the newly created custom attribute value for themselves – they just need to sign in at user.codetwo.com with their Microsoft 365 user credentials, fill in the field next to the new custom attribute's name (e.g. newOtherTelephone), and save the changes.

Fig. 3. Bulk assigning custom attribute’s value to your users.

5. Import the updated CSV file back to the Attributes manager by clicking Import from CSV, selecting the updated CSV file, and choosing Selective import (Fig. 4.).

   Info

   If you want to update the attribute's value(s) in the future, repeat steps 1-5. Alternatively, you can ask your end users to update the value(s) on their own at user.codetwo.com.

Fig. 4. Importing the updated CSV file to Attributes manager.

6. Now, when you design your signature in the template editor at app.codetwo.com, you will be able to insert the new custom attribute just like any other attributes. To access it, go to Placeholder > Message Sender > Additional attributes (Fig. 5.). When a signature, disclaimer or an auto-reply is added to an email, the attribute will be replaced with the value you provided in the CSV file or your users edited at user.codetwo.com.

Fig. 5. Inserting the custom attribute in the template editor.