This blew me away - Central Admin in SharePoint 2007 doesn’t have any ‘Regional Settings’. Now, at one level, this might make sense - perhaps you always want it to match, say, the server time, or UTC time. I’m not convinced, but it might make sense.
<rant>What absolutely doesn’t make sense is that the date format it uses is the stupid American ‘mm/dd/yyyy‘ format. Why can the US not accept that the rest of the Gregorian calendar using world (i.e. nearly everywhere else) uses a format of ‘dd/mm/yyyy‘? I mean, isn’t sensible to have a format that offers a gradiated precision of time, rather than dumping the most specific part of it in the middle? Or, if we wanted to accept that central admin will probably only be used by techies, what’s wrong with ‘yyyy-mm-dd‘? Hell, I’d nearly prefer Javascript’s ‘milliseconds since the start of 1970‘ format (nearly, but not quite).
Make the format configurable, or use a standard format like ‘yyyy-mm-dd’. </rant>
I did find some solutions though - I particularly like the way that is transpires that the regional settings page is there, but that you have to enter the URL by hand…
Hello,
as a feature in MOSS 2007, you can add several language packs and in order to that, it wouldnt make sence to change “regional settings” on central page, because it would afffect all sites. If you would have a site collection with differnt language and regional settings, the central admin page would overwrite these, which should not be expected. To change the regional options for central amdin page you can use the “Mysites” also there. here xou can specify your prefered settings as personal.
Date format globally:
There are lots of blogs about date formats in Sharepoint anyway. As I know by now, SharePoint uses hardcoded default settings for regional options. Maybe with a future service pack or hot fix they will deploy a resoltuion to configure the international ISO 8601 standard.
See also: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/iso8601.html or http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
Yup, I get that in some contexts regional settings wouldn’t make sense. So why choose a date format that is only used, AFAIK, in the USA? (Though I’m not sure what Canada does, to be fair).
Also, most of our customers are in one country (heck, a fair proportion are government). I doubt we’re exceptional. The option to have a region would be nice.
But you’re right, my main gripe isn’t so much with the lack of regional settings, as much as they’ve chosen a default setting which is itself quite regional.
I wonder what happens to central admin for countries which use another calendar? That could get really hairy!
Hi,
I am in Australia and we are using the Calendars sychronised with Outlook. Outlook is fine, but the date setting in SharePoint is all USA (as discussed) and it’s a ripe pain I will be very annoyed if this is something that can’t be changed
We use the “American” date format here in Canada too. Some businesses like to change it to the dd/mm/yy format, but nearly all people here use the mm/dd/yy format.
Well, you guys practically are American anyway, right? ;p
Seriously, thanks, that’s good to know.