How City of Bristol College deployed centralized email signatures across three organizations in five days

Background

City of Bristol College is a further education institution serving the Bristol area in the United Kingdom. With staff members and thousands of students, the college operates a complex Microsoft 365 environment that manages email communications for three distinct organizations: City of Bristol College, SWAC, and Partners in Bristol. 

Following their migration from on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365, the college faced a critical gap in their IT infrastructure. For years, they had managed email signatures using custom scripts that applied signatures to Outlook Web Access and deployed them via login scripts. When they migrated to Microsoft 365, these legacy processes no longer worked. 

The college needed a modern, cloud-based solution that could manage email signatures exclusively for staff while excluding student accounts, support users across multiple platforms, and maintain separate branding for each of their three organizations from a single centralized platform.

City of Bristol College's challenge

Without a dedicated email signature solution in place post-migration, City of Bristol College faced several critical obstacles. 

The IT team encountered multiple pain points: 

• Lost legacy capabilities: Custom scripts and commands stopped working after the Office 365 migration, eliminating their established email signature deployment process. 

• Manual copy-paste burden: Staff had to manually copy email signatures from Outlook Classic to new Outlook, creating inconsistent formatting and incorrectly sized signatures. 

• Multi-organization complexity: The team needed to manage distinct email signatures for three separate organizations while excluding thousands of student mailboxes. 

• No centralized control: Without a unified platform, the IT team had no way to enforce email signature standards or deploy updates efficiently. 

• Brand consistency gaps: The college couldn't ensure compliance or maintain professional brand standards across all staff communications. 

• Operational inefficiency: The manual processes created an unsustainable workload for IT with no visibility into email signature deployment or adoption. 

The college needed a solution that could restore centralized control while supporting their complex multi-organization environment. 

The results

How Exclaimer helped

Already familiar with Exclaimer, City of Bristol College's IT team began their self-service setup independently, working through their IT provider, Circle IT Solutions. The entire rollout took five days with zero issues. 

With Exclaimer, City of Bristol College can: 

• Manage all email signatures for three distinct organizations from a single cloud-based portal 

• Automatically deploy email signatures through the Outlook add-in without manual installation or user intervention 

• Control precisely which users receive email signatures using mail-enabled security groups to exclude students 

• Pull user attributes directly from Entra ID to automatically populate email signature fields 

• Update email signatures centrally and have changes automatically propagate to all users 

• Keep email signatures consistent across Outlook desktop, Outlook on the web, and mobile devices 

• Configure and deploy the entire solution independently using the intuitive self-service platform 

The IT team found the platform intuitive enough to complete setup and deployment on their own timeline without extensive vendor support. This restored the centralized email signature enforcement capabilities they had previously relied on with their on-premises system. 

With centralized control in place, the platform now supports use cases beyond IT, including marketing-led campaigns through targeted email banners across staff communications.