OK so continuing on from my Mimecast posts, we have started looking at the Marketing Advantage, I think that one of the first comments I got about Mimecast was that it was predominantly a Marketing Tool, well yes it is that but for us it is predominantly an email filtering tool.
Any how we are looking at out sourcing our companies website (shame I know as we have a good team of people in house who maintain it and we have the infrastructure in place), but with the Site going to an external company to host and maintain it then raised the question for our e-bulletin's. Our in house developers have written several web services that connects with our CRM and pulls a list of contact emails and then creates an e-bulletin and then sends it. However with the Site being with a a hosting company , we did not want to have to have to implement something to address the issue of the change over. So we thought we would look at Mimecast and their Marketing Advantage.
So I spoke with the guys at Mimecast and they gave me a demo if how their "broadcasts" work. You can build up a list of templates for your "e-bulleting's" and then import a list of Address from your CRM and then send it out, the beauty of this is that it sends it via a completely separate queue so it does not impact your daily in and out bound traffic, plus if the email for some reason does get flagged as spam it will not black list your main SMTP address.
Along with this feature I then discovered that we can brand our emails, ie put in our Email signatures on Mimecast as opposed to our users managing their own signatures. With Mimecasts integration with AD it can pull out all attributes you specify and create a very descriptive email signature, so I through I would try for the IT Team with in my Company creating a copy of our Business card for our signatures. All you need is some basic HTML knowledge and away you go. I actually cheated and used Dreamweaver to create ours, but anything would probably do.
Once you have got your template built you then need to get it so it fills in the parts from AD. so:
<HTML>
<BODY>
<BR>
<BR>
<MC type=body>
<BR>
<BR>
<table width="325" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1"
style="font-family: Verdana;">
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #CCCCCC; background-color: white;
font-famil: verdana; color: #000066; text-decoration: none;
font-size: 9px;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6" width="100%">
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top"; style="padding-left: 5;
font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana;">
<span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066;"><mc type='variable'
source='from' attribute="streetaddress"> <mc type='variable'
source='from' attribute="l"> <mc type='variable' source='from'
attribute="postalcode">
<br />
Tel <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="telephonenumber">
Fax <mc type='variable' source='from'
attribute="facsimiletelephonenumber">
<br />
<mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="homephone"><br />
<mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="mobile"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066; text-decoration:none;
link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">Email
<mc type='variable' source='from' attribute='mail' link='mailto'/>
</span><br />
<a href="http://www.company.com" style="font: verdana;
font-size: 9px; font-weight: bold; color: #000066;
text-decoration:none; link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">
www.company.com</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="60%" valign="top" style="padding-left: 5; font-size:10px;
font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><p>
<span style="font: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: #8A184C;
text-transform:uppercase;"><mc type='variable' source='from'
attribute='name'><br>
</span><span style="font: verdana; font-size: 9px;
color: #000066;"><mc type='variable' source='from'
attribute='description'></span></p>
</td>
<td width="40%" align="right" valign="bottom" style="padding-left: 5;
font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<span class="style1"><mc type=clickimage code=logo></span></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<BR>
<BR>
</body>
</HTML>
So this is what you are presented with:
Mimecast can pull all the above details from within AD so if you are going to implement this then you will need to make sure that your AD is fully up to date.
Also for the DDI what I did was actually put DDI 0123 456 7123 into the field for the Home telephone number as the Telephone Number field was taken up by the main switchboard number.
I set this as Active Stationary for the IT Staff with in the company I work and also put the other bits of the disclaimer under the businesses card, so it works in the same way as it always has done, it will search for a specific phrase in the Disclaimer and then attach/move to the bottom of every email set out of the company (it moves the disclaimer that is already in the email if it is a reply to a reply or something).