Wrong time zone and date format

MVP

Hello,

 

I've noticed that for our tenant, all OneDrive for Business sites have US date format. I am versed in SharePoint, so I know to go to Site Settings and change the regional settings. But that's just me.

 

As an administrator, I need to change all of our user sites to NZ region and language. Note that we sync from local AD, but the language field in AD is blank. I assume that means that the tenant default language and region is applied.

 

Questions:

1. Where can I set the default region and language for the tenant, so that new users get correct OD4B settings for my country?

2. How can I most efficiently change all existing OD4B sites in our tenant to the correct region and time zone?

9 Replies
PowerShell is your best friend here...I think you can solve both 1. and 2. following what it's described here: http://msexperttalk.com/configuring-office-365-preferred-language-settings/

Thanks, I'll take a look at that. It's astounding, though, that this is so hard to do, i.e. not possible with the Office Admin GUI. Or am I missing something?

 

Is Powershell the ONLY way to set the region and time zone for a single region tenant who is not in the US? How do US businesses on the East cost change from the default Pacific time to their time zone? Is Powershell really the only option?

 

Surely, Microsoft can't expect everyone to default to a US setting. Why do they make it so hard to apply non-US as a tenant setting?

PowerShell is the best option for people who enjoy writing code. It is much easier to change a setting in SharePoint by simply going to the appropriate settings page than trying to write a PowerShell script.

 

https://sharepointmaven.com/sharepoint-time-zone/

 

Thanks but I already know that. The link you posted is about SharePoint. My question is about OneDrive for Business (yes, I know, that's SharePoint, too), at the TENANT level. How can I set the default time zone at the tenant level, so that new users' OneDrives get the correct time zone by default and I don't have to manually set it??

Sorry but there is no way to do this, it is quite annoying. 

I can't believe that there is a world of Office 365 users out there, all around the globe, whose OneDrive defaults to US regional settings.

@Ingeborg Hawighorst 
A year late maybe, but looks like there is now a (partial) Tenancy wide solution now for the Timezone problem.

https://sympmarc.com/2018/09/14/set-default-site-time-zone-in-office-365/

@RuthJ  Thanks for posting that. I wasn't aware of this setting.  Do you know if it applies to new OneDrive for Business sites, too? Because the fine print says that it applies "when you create a new modern site". And time zone is just one thing. The region is the other setting that needs adjusting, so the date is displayed in the correct order (DMY vs MDY).

I realise this post if a year old but just wanted to confirm that, after we changed the default time zone in SPO admin center, newly provisioned user accounts have their OneDrive in that time zone (GMT+1 for us).