At our September AI workshop I gave a tour of the signature system I have been building, a replacement for a tool called Exclaimer that puts a consistent, centrally managed email signature on every message leaving a Microsoft 365 tenant. If you missed the origin story, the proof of concept, the mail routing, the DNS and certificate work, that is all in part 5 of this series. This article is about the part people actually touch: the management app.
What does the signature designer actually do?
It lets anyone build a professional email signature by dragging fields onto a canvas, no HTML required. That matters because when Claude first helped me design this, the template screen was just a wall of HTML markup. If you know HTML, great, you can still paste your own straight in. But to most people that screen is gibberish, and I did not want a tool only a developer could use.
So I built a designer with Claude. Fields drag into position on the form. Logos can be swapped, my avatar for the company mark, or an override image entirely, and shaped round, cornered, or square. Alignment works the way you would expect from Microsoft Word. Any element can become a hyperlink. Rows support multiple columns, up to six across, so you can lay out social links, email links, and support links side by side.
How do signatures stay accurate for every employee?
Every field in a signature syncs from the user’s Microsoft 365 attributes, so the signature is always as current as the directory. The settings screen lists the active users and the fields I am allowed to configure in 365 for each account, and those are exactly the fields the signature pulls from. The same template renders with my details on my email and David’s details on his.
The practical payoff: change your title, your department, your address, or your cell number in 365, and every signature that uses that field updates. Nobody circulates a new template. Nobody’s phone shows the old office line for six months. As part of our Microsoft 365 services we can manage those attributes for a client, or hand that access to individuals so people maintain their own. Each field in the designer can be pointed at whichever attribute you want, set it to cell phone and it renders cell phone, leave it on office and it renders office. 365 has no direct dial field, so we borrowed the fax attribute for that. Small hack, works fine.
What can you customize without writing any code?
Icons, colors, sizes, and text styling are all point and click, backed by a full icon library. I wanted a big selection, so Claude helped me incorporate Font Awesome, plus a huge emoji library, plus published brand icons for the social media companies. You can also upload your own. Every icon can change color, change size, or be disabled. Text can be bold or italic, links can show or hide their underline, and colors are yours to pick. Everything saves automatically as you work.
There are practical touches too. Meeting links, like the one I set up for Sabrina’s calendar. Our current Google reviews. And a live preview pane that shows what the finished signature will look like, so you are not sending yourself test emails all afternoon just to check spacing.
How do the scheduled campaign banners work?
You build a time based promotion once, give it a date range, attach it to a group, and it appends itself to outgoing signatures only during that window. In the demo I used a real example, a client’s fall event they had been promoting in their email. I uploaded the event artwork as an icon, added the link, and scheduled it to display from September 1 through October 6, attached to a group. The banner does not appear in the template editor at all. It attaches itself in the actual email during the campaign window, then disappears when the window closes. No one has to remember to take it down.
Who decides which signature goes where?
Signature rules assign templates to groups or to individual people, so the right signature lands on the right email automatically. In my setup, the main new mail template is attached to a group of all employees. But you could have an HR signature, an accounting signature, an engineering signature, each attached to its own group, or pin a specific signature to one person. Rules also cover reply templates and whether a signature applies to internal mail, external mail, or both.
My favorite rule is the internal reply signature. Coworkers do not need the marketing content, the social icons, and the event banner on every message inside the company, so internal replies get a clean, minimal signature instead.
Did it work in a live send?
Yes. During the workshop I sent a message to myself, and the signature that arrived had swapped every placeholder for my real data. The template shows generic phone numbers, but the delivered email carried my correct phone, my email address, my social links, our disclaimer, and the client’s fall event banner. The compose window shows no signature at all, because the signature is stamped on at our server as the mail passes through, which also means it applies from any device.
One fix from testing is worth sharing. Outlook was blocking all of our signature images, the way it blocks remote images in plenty of email you receive. I noticed other companies’ signatures displayed fine, so I asked Claude why ours were blocked. It explained the default behavior and switched our images to embedded images that travel inside the message itself. After that change, everything displayed cleanly. That exchange is the whole development model in miniature: describe the problem in plain English, let the AI diagnose and fix it.
Why does this matter if you are not building a signature tool?
Because this is what internal tooling looks like now: a real, polished management app, built in spare weekend hours by describing what you want. Total build time to the state I demoed was maybe four to five hours of my attention, spread across a Friday proof of concept and weekend refinement. A drag and drop designer, directory sync, campaign scheduling, and rule based assignment used to be a product you subscribed to. Now it is a tool you can own.
We build custom software for clients exactly this way. If there is a subscription you resent, a workflow you wish existed, or a tool that has lived on the someday list for years, the economics just changed. Bring us the problem and we will show you what a weekend can do.