Real german salutation

To use a german salutation, you have to make sure first the gender is somehow determinable in your contacts and leads.

One solution works this way:

1. Customize the contact entity and make Salutation a required field
2. Enter the salutation in a way that makes it easy to distinguish the genders from it. One way could be to always enter "Mr" or "Mrs" into the field

Use the following code in your email template:

Sehr geehrte{if salutation startswith "herr"}r{end if}

That means if the field "salutation" startswith the value "herr" then insert an "r".

Usage of firstname / lastname

This code allows you to address your customers with the firstname, when the firstname is present. Otherwise, you use the salutation and lastname.

This solution requires the Salutation field to be required. You can modify this setting in your CRM's customization area.

Use the following code in your email template:

{if firstname isnull ""}{salutation} {lastname}{end if}{if firstname hasdata ""}{firstname}{end if}

This first checks if firstname is null and if that is the case, it inserts the field "Salutation" followed by a space and the field "Lastname". Otherwise it inserts the field "Firstname".

A greeting with this code would look this way:

Dear {if firstname isnull ""}{salutation} {lastname}{end if}{if firstname hasdata ""}{firstname}{end if},

Email Signature with Photo and Email Address

One common problem is a standardized email signature for all users. This problem is easily solved with the customaze E-Mail Marketing Add-On for Microsoft CRM.

As always there are multiple ways to achieve that result. One very straigt forward way works like this:

1. Go to Settings - Customization - Systemuser - Attributes
2. Make the attribute "photourl" business required
3. Insert that field onto the Systemuser's form
4. Save and Publish all customizations
5. Upload photos of all your users onto some webserver and enter the urls of these images into the regarding systemusers

When you are done, create a template file called signature.htm inside the "files/templates/" subdirectory of the template editor. You have to use an external editor to do this, because the template editor modifies curled braces inside image urls and inside hyperlinks, rendering them unrecognizable for the template engine. Best practice would be to share the directory "files" inside the template editor web application for your network.

Create the design of your signature to match your companies identity. We provide a very simple sample here:

<table width="100%">
 <tr>
  <td>Name:</td>
  <td>{firstname} {lastname}</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>E-Mail:</td>
  <td><a href="mailto:{internalemailaddress}" >{internalemailaddress}</a></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td>Photo:</td>
  <td><img src="{photourl}" alt="{firstname} {lastname}" /></td>
 </tr>
</table>

Save the file and modify your default email template to include the following line:

[include "signature.htm"]

That's all - try it out with the preview module!