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Running Exchange 2013 Server on top of a Windows Server 2012 R2 domain with Outlook 2013 clients.

My multi-site domain is also multilingual. Specifically, some sites are Spanish users and some sites are English users (with bilingual people all mixed in).

Additionally, I make extensive use of Shared folders. Some of these folders are shared by users from different sites (and therefore different languages).

It seems to me that Exchange creates the standard subfolder names (Inbox, Sent Items, Outbox, etc.) based on the language (either system language or browser language) of the first person to actually access the shared folder. That's my guess anyway, but it is not explicitly relevant to my question.

I need to figure out how to do at least one of two things:

  1. Can I make the subfolder names change dynamically based on the "local" language of the client accessing the subfolder? I'm talking about the same way that c:\Users\username\Desktop works on pretty much any Windows install anywhere, but for a Spanish-language install you can also use c:\Usuarios\username\Escritorio and it still works as a sort of alias. Additionally, this is the way it is presented to the Spanish-language user, even though "behind-the-scenes" it is still \Desktop
  2. Failing that, how can I safely switch the English names to the Spanish names (and/or vice versa) without breaking everything? For example, I have one shared folder that is used by 95% by Spanish speakers, but I guess some English speaker accessed the folder first, and now all my Spanish users have problems because they don't know what an Inbox is... I need to change it to Bandeja de Entrada.
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  • Why not just give the folders both English and Spanish names? For example: Sales/Ventas, Engineering/Ingenieria... or something to that affect.
    – joeqwerty
    Aug 28, 2016 at 21:51
  • it's not the shared folder names that are the problem... it is the automatically generated subfolders that are part of every mail folder in Exchange
    – Daniel
    Aug 28, 2016 at 22:17

1 Answer 1

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You can set the mailbox regional settings in Exchange. The folder names are based on the Office language installed at the time the mailbox is first used, if you later change it you can run outlook.exe /resetfoldernames

You could also reset the names via OWA :

If you are an end-user, use Outlook Web App to reset the default folder names:

Log on to Outlook Web App by using your credential. Click Options, and then click See All Options. Click Settings, and then click Regional. On the Regional Settings page, change the language, select the date and time format that you want to use, and then select the Rename default folders so their names match the specified language option. Click Save, and then exit Outlook Web App. Restart Outlook.

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  • No way to have it dynamically change per user 's regional settings?
    – Daniel
    Aug 28, 2016 at 20:44
  • No it says it is based on the default Office language - Resets default folder names (such as Inbox or Sent Items) to default names in the current Office user interface language. - support.office.com/en-ie/article/… See edited answer also.
    – smwk
    Aug 28, 2016 at 22:01

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