Exchange 2007 and above sure have come a long way regarding migration of mailboxes to a new environment, for example the ability to do a cross-forest migration which is now possible. But in some cases, you still have to go with a migration to PST, moving the PST to the new environment and importing it there.
In a lot environments, this proces comes with a lot of confusion regarding regional settings. For example, when mailboxes in the source environment are configured for the dutch language (nl-NL), and this configuration has not been made in the target environment, you’ll end up with a mailbox that has both “Inbox” and “Postvak IN” folders, as well as “Calendar” and “Agenda” folders. No fun to deal with.
Problems following the above are normally confused users, and administrators who have to manually clean up the mess.
How to prevent the Default Language Mess
Exchange 2010 SP1 has a neat command that lets you set the default language setting on a mailbox, which should be set on the target mailbox, where the PST is imported. The language of the target mailbox should match the language of the folders inside the PST. This is set with the following command:
Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -Identity "Userx" -Language nl-NL -LocalizeDefaultFolderName:$true –DateFormat “d-M-yyyy” –TimeFormat “H:mm”
The above command should be used before the PST is imported. If you import the PST first, the foreign language’s folders already exists: so you’ll have a “Postvak IN” instead of “Inbox” prior to changing it with the above command. When the above command lets Exchange change “Inbox” to “Postvak IN”, “Postvak IN” is already present so you’ll end up with a “Postvak IN” and a “Postvak IN1″, also not very nice. So be sure to run the command prior to importing the PST.
Be sure to also set the DateFormat and TimeFormat to the appropriate values.
After the PST’s have been imported, use the above command again to set the default language to the desired language. Present folders will automatically be renamed for you!
On-the-fly renaming of Folders?
Yes we can! When you have a mailbox which has items currently in “Inbox”, “Calendar” or other en-US folders, just run the above command and it will change the names of the folders in a blink of the users eye!
Where confusion occurs
There’s another command that seems to do the same:
Set-Mailbox -Identity "Userx" -Language "nl-NL"
But, when taking a look at the according Technet article, the “language” switch is explained as follows:
The Languages parameter specifies the language preferences for this mailbox, in order of preference. Several Exchange components display information to a mailbox user in the preferred language, if that language is supported. Some of those components include quota messages, non-delivery reports (NDRs), the Outlook Web App user interface, and Unified Messaging (UM) voice prompts.
Long story short, the set-mailbox command with the -identity switch lets you set the preferred language for display information, not the folder names!
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