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How can we improve the tenant admin features O365?

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Change default language in Sharepoint (OneDrive)

For an international company, it is important to define the company language (e.g. English) as the default language. Unfortunately, when initializing O365, the language is set according to the location (in our case "German"). This is devastating because all SharePoint pages (including OneDrive) are subsequently created in "German". This should at least be pointed out.
Unfortunately there is no possibility to change the default language afterwards. The workarounds with multi-language support are not satisfactory. Nevertheless, German continues to dominate in many areas

Please point out the importance of the language during the initial setup and give the possibility to select the default language. As an alternative, it would be good if Microsoft provides a way to change the default language afterwards.

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Gian shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

15 comments

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  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Default language is Hindi in our case, unable to change it to English.
    Most of the email notifications are Hindi from Sharepoint and Onedrive to users, Quite annoying for our employees who receive these emails not understanding them.

  • Dom commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I opened a ticket at MS with the number 14493977. In our case all employees are getting the emails from @sharepointonline.com in the sites default languages. Apparently this can not be changed. Quite annoying for our employees who receive these emails not understanding them.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    We are also stuck with the language problem, when the partner who set up our tenant years ago did not pay attention. And i got a lot of customers with this problem.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is a nobrainer, Comeon Microsoft!
    Anonymous, what Powershell setting are you talking about to change this setting?

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This would be very good. I have not found a solution elsewhere other than to have automated PowerShell changing this setting, which of course may not be correct if one wishes to change to a different language at some point on a particular site.

  • Roger Wehrli commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Totally agree with the feature request. For Switzerland with four languages it is an absolut must have.

  • Pedro Santos commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is a no brainer...we have been waiting for 3 years for this feature . Anytime soon would be more than welcome ! Microsoft ?

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    We are using AzureADSync with attribute "PreferedLanguage" so most of the O365 services are using the correct language. Only the Onedrive for Business (*.mysharepoint.com) is always created with the default language from the tenant. i found a way to change via https://*-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/muisetng.aspx . After that the language is correct displayed for the employees.

    I would like to have a global setting for alternate language in the Onedrive for Business (mysharepoint) sites.

    Thanks,
    Pierre

  • Royce Ng commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Totally agree. The default language (not English) exist on different system areas such as term store, content type hub site, etc etc which is not only annoying, but also affect works with powershell!! Please enable "Factory Reset" option for the sharepoint environment!

  • Jurgen De Wolf commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I have just received this answer from MS support: "The language of a SPO site or ODB can only be selected in the beginning. After that they cannot be changed in any way. This is a design behavior because the customer is part of a multi tenant setup, therefore multiple tenants are affected by the same rules and we cannot change that."

    Devastating, that is the correct term to describe this indeed and it is really necessary to start working on a way to be able to change it. We are a multinational company on Flanders (Flemish/Dutch) speaking, and the partner who set up our tenant years ago did not pay attention to location/language (if they had that choice at all in the first place!). So we're stuck with OneDrive and SharePoint in Dutch. Imagine the Russian, Brazilian, Czech, US etc colleagues who receive OneDrive related messages and access a Dutch OneDrive portal.

    I can not imagine that Microsoft would NOT be overwhelmed by companies/customers that are stuck with the same issue.

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