Have you ever received an email from somebody formatted with stationery of…well, questionable taste? Don’t get me wrong, I love cowboys, swans, and Valentine’s Day as much as the next guy, but in most corporate environments this practice is frowned upon, if not completely banned. Stationery is distracting and can often lead to a negative impression of the sender.
The issue is exasperated somewhat due to the fact that Outlook doesn’t give the end-user much power over the format with which email is viewed. Receiving email formatted with stationery creates a feeling of losing control of one’s inbox. Sure, one could exercise "the nuclear option" and set email to plain text, but most folks prefer not to go that far.
One would think that in most corporate environments, disabling stationery in Outlook 2007 would be both straightforward and a standard operating procedure. However, you’d be surprised how non-trivial this task turns out to be.
To start with, you may look at using Group Policy with Administrative Templates to lock down stationery functionality. It’s a good choice. Most folks don’t know exactly how Outlook needs to be configured upon deployment and Administrative Templates give you both power and flexibility to do what you need to do…when you need to do it.
Let’s say this is the optimal route to take. Next, we need to identify exactly what functionality needs to be locked down. It turns out that in Outlook 2007, there are two areas to be concerned with:
The first area is "Signatures and Stationery" window that is accessed via Tools > Options > Stationery and Fonts… This section allows end-users to set default stationery for all their messages. It’s your primary target.
The second area is a lesser known feature where users can set stationery "on the fly". This is done from the menu bar by clicking Actions > New Mail Message Using > More Stationery… While it is less likely an end user will do this, you will probably want to disable this as well.
This sounds simple enough. However, when you download the Administrative Templates and import them for use, you will discover that there is no configuration option to disable either of these options for Outlook 2007. In fact, in contrast to all the other Office 2007 applications, there are no options to disable any user interface controls for Outlook 2007. Ouch.
So how does one get around this? For starters, Sue Mosher posted an excellent entry on the Microsoft lists last year that basically tells you how to solve the problem. For starters, disabling the ability of the user to set stationery as a default format is accomplished by writing the following to the registry:
HKCUSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftOffice11.0CommonMailSettings
REG_SZ: NewStationery
Value: <Blank>
This setting works with Outlook 2007 when "11.0" is substituted with "12.0". Once the registry setting is in place, any attempt by the user to set this value will simply "not stick" when a new message is actually composed.
SSo the next step is figuring how to push this down to each user’s workstation via Group Policy. We already saw this can’t be done with the built-in .ADM files that Microsoft provides, so you’ll have to build your own. It’s actually not difficult to do this. In fact, below is a sample .ADM file I created that you can import into your own test lab. Simply copy and paste the following text into Notepad and save it as a file with the .ADM extension. NOTE: Make sure the file is not .adm.txt.
CLASS USER
CATEGORY !!CustomUserSettings
CATEGORY !!Outlook2007
POLICY !!DisableNewStationery
EXPLAIN !!DisableNewStationery_Explain
KEYNAME "SoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftOffice12.0CommonMailSettings"
VALUENAME "NewStationery"
VALUEON ""
VALUEOFF NUMERIC 1
END POLICY
POLICY !!DisableNewTheme
EXPLAIN !!DisableNewTheme_Explain
KEYNAME "SoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftOffice12.0CommonMailSettings"
VALUENAME "NewTheme"
VALUEON ""
VALUEOFF NUMERIC 1
END POLICY
POLICY !!Disablecommandbarbuttonsandmenuitems
KEYNAME SoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookDisabledCmdBarItemsList
PART !!EnteracommandbarIDtodisable LISTBOX
VALUEPREFIX TCID
END PART
EXPLAIN !!SpecifytheIDforacommandbartodisable
END POLICY
END CATEGORY
END CATEGORY
[strings]
DisableNewStationery="Disable Modify Default Stationery
DisableNewStationery_Explain="Prevents users from changing the default stationery. NOTE: To disable, set to ‘Not Configured’ or move GPO out of scope.
DisableNewTheme="Disable Modify Default Theme
DisableNewTheme_Explain="Prevents users from changing the default theme. NOTE: To disable, set to ‘Not Configured’ or move GPO out of scope.
Disablecommandbarbuttonsandmenuitems="Disable items in user interface
EnteracommandbarIDtodisable="Enter a command ID to disable:
SpecifytheIDforacommandbartodisable="Specify the ID for a command bar to disable.
Outlook2007="Outlook 2007"
CustomUserSettings="COMPANY Custom User Settings"
On a lab Domain Controller, either create a new test Group Policy or extend an existing one. Navigate to the "Administrative Templates" folder under "User Settings" and right-click it. You will then have an option to import the .ADM file. Once this is done, you will see the following. /P>
There are a couple of things here that warrant a little discussion. For starters, you can see that I created a descriptive "root" container so that it’s clear to all that these are customized settings. I also used a nested CATEGORY tag to create a sub-container called "Outlook 2007". This allows me to group those settings together. When you look at the settings, you can see that all the necessary options are included, including the ability to specify one or more interface options to disable.
Setting "Disable Modify Default Stationery" and "Disable Modify Default Theme" (should you elect to do that as well), is simple enough. Just switch the option to "Enable" and you’re done. To disable Actions > New Mail Message Using > More Stationery…, you’re going to need to know the command bar ID. In her post, Sue Mosher tells you the value is 5611 for Outlook 2003. It turns out this is also true in Outlook 2007. You can convince yourself about this by installing Outlook Spy and inspecting the IDs yourself. This is done by clicking "Explorer" on the new Outlook Spy menu bar….
…and switching to the "CommandBars" tab. In this case, you’ll find what you’re looking for under the "Menu Bar" group.
So now that we know the ID with confidence, we can configure the GPO. Simply double-click the "Disable items in user interface" setting, switch it to "Enabled" and click the "Add…" button as seen in the following screenshot.
NOTE: You can repeat this step for any other interface option that you want to disable.
Once this is done, simply link the GPO to a test OU with a test computer object in it and give it a try. Be sure to run the gpupdate /force command from your test workstation first to be sure the settings have been applied. If all goes well, you will find that stationery in both situations is eliminated.
The nice thing about this is because we’re using Group Policy, these settings can always be removed by simply setting the option to "Not Configured". So if you have been a little overzealous with cleansing your environment from tacky stationery, you have an easy way to roll things back.
By the way, these customized settings look good when using the Group Policy Management Console. This is important because you others may need to look at how GPOs are utilized in your environment.
This is one of many great examples of the power of Active Directory Group Policy Administrative Templates. If you can’t find something provided by Microsoft, you can always get a little creative and build it yourself.
