Forum Discussion
Usage Location
Does anyone know how usage location affects M365 apps? We don't have Teams calling so are not concerned on the calling front, but could/would users in Japan have issues with M365 desktop/online apps if their usage locations were set to US?
We use AD Connect and all our global users' usage locations are set to US.
4 Replies
- Generally speaking, apps will work just fine. There will be an increased latency, as the Usage location determines where some data is stored/services are being accessed, so the round trip from Japan will obviously take more time compared to US. That's assuming the users will be in the US, if they are going to be accessing O365 from Japan, go with Japan as usage location.
As far as I know, the usage location specifies the country of the user. Based on that location, you sometimes can/can't use certain parts of your license (Microsoft 365 E3 for example) Your data is in the region in which your tenant is, West Europe in my case, and all your Exchange/OneDrive/Teams/Sharepoint etc. data is stored in that region. It will not move to America for example if you change the location of a user to America. It can however impact the PSTN/Calling functions, restrictions in configuring telephone and emergency phone numbers. And it will have a latency aspect in downloading files/emails, but I don't think it will have a big impact on Teams meetings. Distance is always a thing of course, but if they users are in a Japan office they could use Express Route connections to connect to Teams in US across the Microsoft backbone.
Harm_Veenstra Is there any difference between "Preferred data location" and "Usage location" Attributes. I've configured Multi-Geo for one our client, changed "Preferred data location" attribute but usage location is still same as the tenant region. Do we need to change it as well ?
