Rocketseed Signature on Compose for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

by Janine Ferenčak |MD, RocketDev

To see or not to see? That is the email signature question. 

Do your staff need to see their email signatures every time they write business emails? Or would you prefer all your employees’ company email signatures to be branded only after they press ‘send’? With Rocketseed’s Signature on Compose for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the choice is yours.

To help you make the right choice for your business, I’ll show you what Signature on Compose is all about – what it does, how it works and why it may, or may not, be the best fit for your business email signature management requirements.

Let’s get started…

What is Signature on Compose?

The name says it all. Signature on Compose is a Rocketseed-developed add-in for Outlook and Google Mail which allows you to see your email signature when you are composing your email, as opposed to your signature being applied after you have pressed ‘send’. Your signature will also appear on your ‘sent’ emails.

Why have we developed it?

We developed Signature on Compose in response to requests from select customers with specific requirements for their employees to see their signatures before sending, and to have a record of their signatures in their sent items. While meeting their requirements perfectly, for others it’s an option to consider and isn’t designed as a standard one-size-fits-all email signature solution.

How Signature on Compose for Microsoft 365 works

With Signature on Compose, when you compose your email, Rocketseed connects to the Microsoft 365 Signature API which allows us to pull the signature from Rocketseed and insert it into your Microsoft 365 user account.

Within your business, the Signature on Compose plugin is installed by your Microsoft 365 Administrator and then becomes available to the users specified by the Administrator within the Microsoft 365 tenant.

For Rocketseed Microsoft 365 users, Signature on Compose will automatically add your full signature or your shorter reply signature (if you have created one) in the compose or reply window as appropriate. If you wish, you can easily select to have your full email signature applied to all your ‘reply’ and ‘forward’ emails.

How Signature on Compose for Google Workspace works

The Rocketseed application connects to the Gmail API which pulls the users’ information from the Rocketseed database. The assigned signature and user information is then inserted as a signature when an email is being created.

Within your business, the Google Workspace Administrator creates a service account and generates a token and then provides this token along with the associate permissions to Rocketseed which allows for authentication to the Google Workspace tenant.

Who can use Signature on Compose?

Signature on Compose is available to users of Rocketseed for Microsoft 365 and Rocketseed for Google Workspace.

How much does Signature on Compose cost?

There are no additional fees to use this functionality on a Rocketseed account.

Is Rocketseed Signature on Compose right for your business?

It might be your company policy for all email signatures to be visible when they are sent and remain viewable within sent emails, giving a ‘record’ of the signatures that were sent.

Maybe it’s simply a case of personal preference and a sense of reassurance that the right signature is always seen to be sent.

There are however, some limitations that you may wish to consider when deciding if Signature on Compose is right for your business email requirements.

Perhaps most significantly, with Signature on Compose individual employees are able to amend their own email signatures. In other words, their signatures are no longer tamper-proof, which may jeopardize the consistency of your brand ‘stamp’ across all your company email.

Also, any email banner campaigns assigned to run at the top of your team’s emails will not be visible in the compose window, being separate from the signature. These will be applied once the emails are routed to the Rocketseed server after pressing ‘send’.

The Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Signature API isn’t available for mobile devices and so signatures cannot be seen on compose when using them. Rocketseed does, however, still brand these emails in the usual way when the email is routed via the server.

Signature on Compose for Google Workspace is only available for emails sent from Gmail on the web and always applies your full signature, including on any reply emails.

It’s all about choice

To see, or not to see? It’s always good to have a choice and that’s what Signature on Compose is about.

Is it right for your business? As you can see there are a number of important factors to consider – from company policy and personal preference to ensuring your staff email signatures are consistently branded company-wide.

Ultimately, the biggest question is how much control do you want individual employees to have over your brand on your business’s number one communications channel?

Curious about Signature on Compose for your business?