I worked with a colleague this week to create a standardardised email signature for all the users on our internal Microsoft Exchange.

The signature template was already defined so it was just a case of tapping into trhe LDAP to extract each user’s individual profile and use the data in there to create their personal signature.

After a bit of Googling, we couldn’t find any scripts that automated the process of:

1. Connect with LDAP
2. Create a text-based signature
3. Create a rich text signature
4. Create an HTML signature
5. Automatically apply the rendered signatures to the user’s Outlook profile

With a bit of digging around, we managed to create a single VB Script that would be processed when the user logged on to the Exchange. Using this method, the signature should automatically be updated if any of the information is updated on Exchange such as new telephone numbers, job titles or department moves.

I’ve uploaded the script to Github so it is available for anyone to use. Find all the details and latest revisions on the Profile Based Exchange Signatures repository.

If you find this useful, leave a comment below. It would be great to know if this script has been used elsewhere.

Also, feel free to contribute to the repository, such as tidying up any loose code. The whole exercise was a few hours work so it’s not perfect but does the job.

Sometimes, you want to use an RSS feed as a data source. This may be for publishing on your website or for mashing up data with another service.

Recently, I’ve been building a corporate intranet with the functionality to embed RSS feeds within the content. It’s a great way of generating fresh content in a controlled environment with minimum effort. Unfortunately, there are quite a few RSS feeds which include embedded links for sharing the item via services like ShareThis or Feedburner’s FeedFlare. One such example was the Post Online RSS Feed.

This seemed like an ideal job for Yahoo’s Pipes to tidy up. Here is the process I went through to create the sanitized version:

1. Create a Pipe on Yahoo Pipes (you may need to sign in with a Yahoo! account).
2. Drag Fetch Feed from Source on to the canvas.
3. Enter the URL of your feed.
4. Drag Regex from Operators on to the canvas.
5. Select the item to sanitize, e.g. item.description.
6. In the replace text box, enter <(.|\n)*?>.
7. Leave the with text box empty.
8. Check the g checkbox.
9. Drag a connection from the bottom of Fetch Feed to the top of Regex.
10. Drag a connection from the bottom of Regex to the top of Pipe Output.
11. To test your Pipe, highlight the Pipe Output box and check the results in Debugger panel at the base of the browser.
12. If all has gone to plan, you can Save your new Pipe, give it an appropriate name and start using your new clean feed.

Hopefully, you’ll find this useful. If you do, leave a comment below. Equally, if you encounter any issues with the process, share the problem and how you may have fixed it.