If not, does anyone know how to do this?

I know from my experience with Regional and Language Settings that the locale “Swedish” is associated with the international standard date format, so I’ve selected that in Sharepoint. Crude, but effective.

I have another problem regarding the date format in WSS 3.0

I’ve used the URL by hand solution and now I have the desired date format (dd/mm/yyyy) in Central Administration Backup and Restore History.

Although in the spbrtoc.xml still shows the date format in mm/dd/yyyy. I’m running a backup retention script upon this file that is failing because 06/11/2009 is diferent than 11/06/2009, so when I set retention for 7 days it erases all backup point.

Any ideas on how to solve this?!

Best regards

Luis

pravesh sharda

I’m aware of Microsoft’s penchant for mm/dd/yyyy, but I still get confused in certain sites, particularly if you’re shifting from a dd/mm/yyyy formatted user solution, and then going to a mm/dd/yyyy formatted Central admin.

And I guess the crux of it all is that I can’t see any good reason why I should have to. Yes, I can live with it – but why should I have to?.

I must confess, I’m surprised by Kenya – as an ex-colony, I’d've thought it would be dd/mm/yyyy. Interesting list. And good to know what they do in Canada – I had wondered. Presumably they do something different in Quebec? ;p

I had big issues with Reporting Services some time ago where it would validate it as US, but format it as the desired dd/mm/yyyy – you can imagine how frustrating that was. They fixed it in RS 2000 but then the bug reappeared in the SSRS 2005 beta. Grrrr.

As for Sharepoint, it’s browser based and should always use the setting of the end users locale – as you can easily do in Reporting Services now. But it doesn’t look like it does that.

And for the record, Canada is officially dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd but being so close to the US mm-dd-yyyy is more often used and accepted. I emigrated to Canada from the UK last year and everybody here says it’s confusing. Many are in the habit of writing the month name in to avoid ambiguity, either as 1 Jan 2009 or Jan 1, 2009.

I believe the US, Phillipines, Micronesia, Palau, Belize and Kenya are the only countries where the US format is the official format.

There is just a plain lack of thought of other parts of the world in this app!

Problem solved. Forever.

There is no excuse for failing to address this US date format issue.

It reminds me of their absolute and beligerant refusal to fix the textbox in Visual Studio 6 that was too small to show the filename part of (long) paths used by Reference objects, and you couldnt even scroll inside it to reveal the filename. Now VS6 is not supported – HA! what a joke ! They never really supported it anyhow !!!

Anyhow thanks for the info. I’ve just wasted another hour of my time trying to resolve yet another Micro$oft anti-customer defect. God knows how many hours everyone else has wasted over this.

Seriously, thanks, that’s good to know.

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

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!

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