How should you handle email signatures after a merger? In stages. On day one, customers need to know who they are dealing with, so each side's signature changes to show the new relationship. Later, if the two Microsoft 365 tenants are combined, the signatures have to survive the move. Planning both stages up front saves doing the job twice.
The legal change usually comes before the systems change. On completion day, two organisations are one group, but people are still sending from two sets of mailboxes, often in two tenants. What changes in the signature:
If each side's tenant already uses Footer365, each changes its own templates, and a banner campaign with an end date carries the announcement.
Often the next step is to move everyone into one Microsoft 365 tenant while keeping two brands, or two email domains, for some time. That is a rules problem, and a common one.
Our guide to targeting a rule by department, group or domain covers each choice, including Department and Group members for teams that send from a shared domain.
Moving mailboxes and domains between tenants is the risky part of any merger, and signatures are a small part of it. Three things to plan:
In Footer365, Import and backup under Signatures, Templates lets you download every template and rule as one backup file, with the images they use, and restore it into another Footer365 account. A restore only adds, so restored rules arrive alongside anything already there; check the rule list afterwards so nobody is covered twice. See backing up and restoring your signatures.
Footer365 works with each Microsoft 365 tenant through that tenant's own consent and its own mail flow objects, so the destination tenant needs connecting by its own Global Administrator if it is not already.
Footer365 only signs mail from domains it has synced for that tenant and that Microsoft 365 reports as enabled for email. While a domain is part way through a move, mail from it may pass through unsigned. It is still delivered: a domain Footer365 does not recognise is never a reason to hold mail. Once the domain is settled in the new tenant and synced, signing resumes.
Before the source tenant is decommissioned, end its Footer365 subscription so its transport rules and connectors are removed and its Outlook signatures turned back on, and then remove Footer365's access from that tenant's enterprise applications.
Mergers are busy enough without a weekend spent fixing signatures. Two templates and two rules, set up before the move, mean the signature is the one thing that just works.
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