Snippets your people insert from Outlook

A snippet is a short, approved text that your people insert into a message from the Outlook add-in, such as a first reply to an enquiry, a holiday closure notice or directions to your office. You write it once in the portal, with the same merge fields as a signature, so each person's copy carries their own name, department and details. You choose who can use each snippet, and it is offered to them in a Snippets tab in the add-in's pane.

Footer365 makes the Snippets page available to organisations gradually, so it may not be in your portal yet. See Early access pages and features.

Snippets are included on every account. They work whether your organisation adds signatures with mail flow or with the Outlook add-in only, and they carry on while signatures are paused.

What a snippet can hold

A snippet is text: paragraphs, bold, italic, links, bulleted and numbered lists, and merge fields. It has no pictures, colours or fonts of its own, and it takes the font of the message it goes into, because Outlook does not let an add-in insert styled text at the cursor. A snippet carries no files either: to share a price list or a brochure, link to it where it is kept, on your website or in SharePoint.

A link must start with https://, mailto: or tel:. Footer365 cleans the text when you save it, so anything pasted from a web page or a document keeps its words and loses its styles and anything that could run.

A snippet can be up to 20,000 characters long, and an organisation can have up to 200.

Write a snippet

You need the Manage signatures permission. Anyone with View signatures can see the list and open a snippet, so staff guides can be written from it.

1. Go to Signatures > Snippets in the portal, or open Snippets, and select New snippet.
2. Give it a Name that people will recognise in the pane, such as "First reply to an enquiry". Names are unique in your organisation, whatever the capitals.
3. Optionally give it a Category, such as Sales. The pane shows it under the name, and people can search by it.
4. Write the Text. The buttons over the box make text bold or italic, add a Link, and start a bulleted or numbered list. Insert field adds a merge field where the cursor is, shown in the box as a pill with the field's name.
5. Under Who can use it, choose who is offered it (see below).
6. Leave Status on, and select Save.

Start from an example

While your organisation has no snippets, the Snippets page may also offer Start from an example: four examples to start from, "Thank you for getting in touch" and "Happy to talk it through" under the category Replies, "Following up" under Follow-ups, and "Directions to our office" under Directions. Tick the ones you want and select Add the ticked examples. They are added switched off, for all emails and for everyone, so you can open each one, change the wording, choose who can use it and switch it on when it is ready. Adding them is recorded in the audit log. Footer365 makes starter content available to organisations gradually, so the examples may not be offered in your portal yet.

A snippet is offered as soon as it is saved: the next time someone opens the Snippets tab, they see it. There is no draft and no approval, because a person reads a snippet as it goes into their message and sends the message themselves, so nothing reaches a customer that they have not seen. Every save and every deletion is recorded in the audit log, with what changed.

Merge fields

Insert field offers the person's own details (such as first name, job title and department), their contact details, your company's details, today's date and the year, their manager's name, job title, email and phone, your own fields from Directory > Custom fields, and the Exchange custom attributes. Each is filled in for the person who inserts the snippet, from their own record, when they open the Snippets tab. Merge fields and empty fields

When a person has no value for a field, the field is left out. A mark that stands only between two fields, such as the bar in "Job title | Department", goes with it, and the words you typed always stay. So write the text to read well without a field that some people do not have, or fill the field in.

The fields that are only known when a message is sent, such as the time sent, the recipient, and the person sending on a mailbox's behalf, are not offered, because a snippet is filled in while the message is being written.

Preview

Preview shows the text as a chosen person would insert it, filled in with their own details. Choose them under Preview as. It opens on you when you are in the directory, and it uses the text on the page, saved or not.

Under the preview, a note names each field the text uses that some of your people have no value for, with how many, and a link to preview the text as the first of them. The preview needs permission to view the directory.

Choose who can use it

Who can use it works as it does for a signature rule:

• Who sends it: All users, Specific users, Group members, Email domain, Department or Job title.
• And only when: optional conditions on any synced directory field, such as Country is United Kingdom.
• Except these senders: people, groups, departments or domains who are never offered it, whatever else it says.
• Email type: All emails, New emails only, Replies only or Forwards only. A snippet for replies is only offered in a reply.

Who a message goes to and the time of day do not decide whether a snippet is offered, so a snippet has no recipients or schedule. A person picks a snippet by hand, and hiding wording they may want would only get in their way. How rules work

To stop offering a snippet without losing it, turn Status off and save. It is kept, and shown as Off in the list.

The Snippets list

The list on Snippets shows each snippet with its category, the start of its text, Who can use it, which messages it Shows for, how many times it was inserted or copied in the last 30 days (Used, 30 days), and whether it is on.

A snippet whose text uses a field that no longer exists, for example one deleted from Directory > Custom fields, shows an Unknown field pill in its text and, while it is on, Check the wording as its status. Hover over the pill to see which field. The missing field is left out where the snippet is inserted. Open the snippet and remove the field, because a snippet that names a field that does not exist cannot be saved.

Delete a snippet

Open the snippet, select Delete, and confirm with Delete snippet. People can no longer insert it. Messages already written with it are not affected.

What your people see in Outlook

When someone has at least one snippet for the message they are writing, the Footer365 pane has a Snippets tab beside Signature. Someone with no snippets sees no new tab, so their pane is as it was.

• The tab lists their snippets with the name, the category, which messages each is for and the start of its text, filled in with their own details.
• Search snippets narrows the list by name, category or text.
• Insert puts the snippet in the message where the cursor is, and the cursor ends after it. If the cursor was never in the message, Outlook puts it at the top. The signature is not touched.
• In a plain-text message, the snippet goes in as plain text: links are written out after their words, and lists use dashes or numbers.
• Copy copies the snippet, to paste wherever it is wanted. Where a version of Outlook does not let the add-in put text in the message, the pane says so, turns Insert off for the rest of the session, and offers Copy instead.
• Refresh reads the snippets again, for example after one has been changed.

Footer365 counts how many times each snippet is inserted or copied each day, for the list in the portal. It records nothing about who inserted it, the message or its recipients. Deploying the Outlook add-in

Related

• Merge fields and empty fields
• Deploying the Outlook add-in
• Disclaimers