Remove Local Signatures - Outlook 2016

[rbingham917]

Hello my fellow JAMF'ers- Hopefully someone can lead me in the right direction with this.

We are looking into implementing Macs more heavily into our environment, and one of my projects is seeing if there is a way that we can disable all local signatures from the Outlook client (We are running a mix of 2011 and 2016-non 365).

The reason being, that we had obtained a fellow company last year, and they are using locally configured signatures with their outlook clients, and we are using Exchange with Policy Patrol to create signatures based off of AD. This obviously will cause some confusion/make us look bad, if they have neglected to change/update their signatures.

My questions are:

1- Is this even possible to do silently/by script? Either uncheck all locally set up signatures for our email accounts, or remove them entirely.

2- Would it be worth my time to even attempt this, or would it be better to either pay the client a visit, or send out a KB and do the honor system method? Since we have roughly 50-ish macs out in the field that would fall under this situation, is it worth our time?

Thanks a bunch- Robert.

[thoule]

You need to do it with Applescript

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
    delete signature 1
end tell

Which you can likely do with bash script as

osascript -e 'tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to delete signature 1'

Put that osascript line in the Files & Processes -> Execute Command and run it on each machine. It likely applies to only logged in users. And it will likely generate a call to the helpdesk for each missing signature. If you play with those commands a bit, you could also create a signature for everyone as well.

[rbingham917]

@thoule Thank you so much for your help. I SERIOUSLY need to get up to snuff on my scripting (haven't done any since '03).

[milesleacy]

I'm significantly impressed if your AD records are consistently and correctly populated enough to automate signatures based on AD records!!!

If that's the case, can I poach someone from your AD team? ;-)

[Look]

The signtures themselves end up stored as a folder for each signature in the following location.

~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Signatures

As far as I can tell simply deleting them doesn't cause any particular issue, they just disappear from Outlook, although there are probably database references somewhere that aren't removed as would happen using a tell. There may be issues if you did this with Outlook running however.
If your wanting to add signatures you definitely have to tell Outlook to do it.

We have ours semi automated using AD credentials and prompting the user to check the details first before adding, they run it through Self Service.