PPRuNe Forums - Social Media icons and hyperlinks on OWA email signature

OK, so Outlook's little bastard half-brother OWA sucks. But that's no reason not to *hack* OWA and inspire it to do more than it was designed to do, to push OWA well beyond its design limitations. Is it? Of course not.

Roll up your sleeves, pour a cup of coffee or tea and let's beat and pound OWA into submission. This little ditty not only allows you to insert a graphic into your OWA signature, it hyperlinks that graphic to your web site.

You are about to achieve a couple of things OWA was not designed to do; and trust me, if you are successful, you will become an IT Rock Star, even if your bosses don't realize it.

If you are VERY careful, this will work for you the FIRST time:

1.) Put your graphic file (.jpg, .gif, .png, or whatever) onto your web site (this will become externally referenced in the below HTML). If you have server-side control to your Exchange server, place your graphic there; otherwise, anywhere on your web site will do -- and write down the path to this graphic.

2.) Open Notepad on a Windows XP/7/8 PC with access to the internet.

3.) Copy and paste the below HTML code into Notepad:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML xmlns:o = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office">
<HEAD><TITLE>FCB_Sig_Template</TITLE>
<META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.19394">
</HEAD>
<BODY><DIV><DIV style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; FONT: 12px Arial; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: rgb(0,128,128); WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px" align=left>
YOUR_NAME<BR>
YOUR_TITLE<BR>
YOUR_COMPANY_NAME<BR>
YOUR_BUSINESS_UNIT_OR_DEPARTMENT<BR>
YOUR_STREET_ADDRESS<BR>
CITY, CT  ZIPCODE<BR>
Tel.: XXX.XXX.XXXX<BR>
Fax.: XXX.XXX.XXXX<BR>
<A href="mailto:[email protected]">USER_EMAIL_ADD [email protected]</A><BR>
<A href="http://www.YOUR_WEB_SITE.COM/">
<IMG style="BORDER-BOTTOM-STYLE: none; BORDER-RIGHT-STYLE: none; BORDER-TOP-STYLE: none; BORDER-LEFT-STYLE: none" src="http://www.YOUR_WEB_SITE.COM/PATH/YOUR_GRAPHIC_FILE_NAME" width=XXX height=XXX></A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; FONT: 10px Arial; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); WORD-SPACING: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px" align=left>
<SPAN style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify">Sent via Microsoft Outlook Web Application (OWA)</SPAN>
</DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>

4.) Look at the HTML and be replace items in CAPS with your real information (e.g. NAME, etc., and replace X's with real numbers.

5.) Save your modified HTML to the desktop.

6.) Open Internet Explorer and run the HTML file you just created.

7.) Open up the OWA signature editor.

8.) Copy and paste what you see displayed by Internet Explorer into the OWA signature editor and save it.

9a.) TEST.

9b.) Tweak font face, size, color to suit your needs. The above example is an Arial font face, color is teal. Repeat step 9a as needed.

You're done.

And get this -- you can copy and paste the contents of an OWA email signature editor into any Outlook email signature editor, save it, test it, and thereby create or recreate any Outlook email signature, regardless of version.

P.S. I recently rolled out this solution for over 200 users working at a bank, so this isn't a hypothetical -- it's a very real, deployed solution.