Creating individual corporate email signatures for staff

Our staff email signatures are a varied mix of good and bad. When I need to respond to someone who has just emailed me, I’d like to be able to look at the signature to see his or her position/title, room/office number and phone extension. For external email recipients, additional contact information should be included including a link to our website and to our Twitter feed. Personal badges and other clutter should be avoided for a clean, professional looking email. I want it to look like this:

Google Apps Manager or GAM (https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM/wiki) allows a Google Admin to set signatures for accounts in the domain. So, I use a Python script to create an html signature for each staff person as well as a batch file that tells GAM which signature file to upload to each account.

It all starts with a spreadsheet. The one I use is the Form Responses sheet from a Google Form I use to collect the necessary data from staff. I do this so that individuals are able to decide on how their names show and to ensure that we have accurate information about room numbers and phone extensions. This also allows the individual to decide whether or not to include a personal cell phone number in the signature.

The column headers in the spreadsheet are:
Timestamp, email, Name, Position, Room, Extension, Mobile, Include_Mobile

The script then processes the data in the spreadsheet to create a signature file for each row and staff member as well as a batch file that I run in terminal with the command:

python gam.py batch batchfile.txt

This creates the individualized email signature seen above. KIS social media links like official KIS Twitter feeds, Facebook and Instagram links will be added in the fall of 2017.