Automatisation Office 365 Language Settings

By using Office 365 you are syncing your local Active Directory with Azure AD which is comming together on Office 365.
For best practise of Microsoft the way to sync the informations we should use AADConnect.

Office 365 creates new users automaticaly with Default Language settings of O365 Tenant. For multi Language companies this can become a problem.
An Administrator or the User by itself needs to edit the Language settings for each user who do not work with the Tennant’s default Language.
In some cases this can be very dificult, if for example the Letters are Cyrilic, or Japanese instead of Latinic.

There is an easy way to prevent this issue:
Lets make an example how to prevent this problem…

We have a company whicj is named Contoso Ltd.
The Company’s locations are in Switzerland (DE), London (EN) and Moscow (RU)
The Tenant Language of the Company is set to english.

A new user joins the company in London office. The HR creates a new User object in the Active Directory called “User01”. The AADConnect is setted up to run every 60min a sync form the local AD to the Azure AD.
Because the default Language settings of the O365 Tenant is english, the user01 will also get his O365 profile in english. This is good so far if the User’s native language is English.

The User01 is not the only new employee who starts his job in the company. For the Office in Moscow ther is also a new worker, but he do not speaks or understands english.
The HR creates for this employee also a User object called “User02” and this account will also be synced to the O365 Cloud. Everything runs identical like by the User01, the Language settings will be set to english.
But as we know, the User02 don’t speaks or understands english at all.
To prevent problems or support Tickets you have to edit by creating a new user in the Active Directory the Default AD-Attribut “PreferredLanguage”.
If you fill in this Attribut with the right “CultureCode” or “Language Culture Name”, Office 365 will be able, to set the right default Language for the specific user.

(The table with the „Language Culture Name“ and „Culture Code“ I will present in the end of this article.)

If you have a multi Language organisation, I highly recommend you always to maintain this field. This ensures that everyone in the Office 365 has the correct language settings.
Attention: In this case is Not included:

Outlook Online (OWA):

Here every user will be asked after the very first start which Language he would like to use.

Region:

Unfortunately, the O365 profile attribute “Location” can not be controlled by On-Prem. The AD attribute “localeID” has no effect on the profile settings. This can be set up by means of a script.

Table for “Language Culture Name” and “Culture Code”