Configuring regional settings for all users in Live@edu

When users of Live@edu first login to their accounts they are presented with the following screen:

Your Live@edu users will only see this screen once, however many administrators do not want to give their users the scope to pick the wrong locale! The question begs: how can I set this for all my users so that they don’t have to choose?

PowerShell to the rescue!

It is possible, through Windows PowerShell to configure regional and language settings for individual mailboxes. It is also possible to apply this to every user. For example:

To set an individual user to English (UK), and GMT Standard Time:

Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration  -Language en-gb –TimeZone "GMT Standard Time"

To set all users in the tenant to English UK, and GMT Standard Time:

Get-Mailbox –Resultsize unlimited | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –Language en-gb –TimeZone "GMT Standard Time"

To retrieve settings for all users in the tenant:

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration

Depending on the number of users in the tenant this may take several minutes to process, and some warning messages may be displayed to inform you that you’ve exceed your Throttling Policy budget; this is just a warning and the command will complete. Once these settings changes have been made users will not have to make these choices at first login, or at any subsequent login. Users will still have the option to manually change them through their Options panel at any time. Simple!

Users created after running this command will still get asked to choose; so it’s probably a good idea to run this every time you create a new batch of users to ensure the new users are set correctly.