PowerShell: Outlook unified signature based on Active Directory information

I came across this nice PowerShell solution to have unified Outlook signature based on Active Directory information in your company. Check it out!

Outlook signature based on user information from Active Directory

Deploying a Unified Email Signature Template in Outlook

Microsoft TechNet Script Center link: Outlook signature based on user information from Active Directory

Outlook and Global Catalog…

A collegue of mine was recently working on a Citrix server in a remote site and noticed that starting Outlook was really slow. Setup:

- Main data center: DC’s + Exchange
- Remote site: DC + Citrix servers

When he checked, he noticed a lot of traffic going to the DC’s in the main data center and not to the local DC although the local DC was also GC. When he checked he found that Outlook connects by default to the same GC as the Exchange server. A quick search revealed that there is a registry tweak to have Outlook connecting to the nearest or specific GC. See the MS KB for details! After setting that registry entry, Outlook opened in just seconds i.o. minutes!!

 

Connect to the nearest GC

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider

Value name: Closest GC
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Hexadecimal
Value data: 0×00000001

 

Connect to a specific GC

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider

Value name: DS Server
Data type: REG_SZ (string)
Value data: FQDN of the global catalog server

 

How to configure Outlook to a specific global catalog server or to the closest global catalog server
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319206