Project Web Access Language and Regional Settings

A Lesson by The Professor Project Web Access Language and Regional Settings

Hello students!  

In Microsoft Office Project 2007, you could install language packs (LPKs) but could not view the list of languages installed. In addition, the language displayed was chosen by your browser’s language settings. In Project 2010, the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) will allow access to all the language packs installed for Project Web Access (PWA). This will give you the freedom and control to change the language of the User Interface (UI) on the fly. Furthermore, Project Server offers the flexibility of altering regional settings on the fly. In this lesson, I will explain how to change the Regional and Language Settings for PWA and the expected behavior.

WSS Regional Settings

The Windows Shared Services (WSS) Regional Settings in Microsoft Project Server offers you a unified cultural experience and provides formatting appropriate to the locale for your sites. Date and time formatting information is pulled from SharePoint.  When provisioning a PWA instance, the WSS Regional Settings for the top-level of site collections are set by default to those of the base language locale of the site collections (for example, English (U.S.)).  The Site Administrator can customize the default Server Site Locale behavior and local users can configure their Server User Locale site settings as they wish (see instructions below).

You do not need to install Language Packs to configure Regional Settings.  See the Language Settings section.

• Server Site Locale

  • Site Administrators can change the default locale of a PWA site by navigating to the WSS Regional Settings page under Site Administration. 
  • All users logging in for the first time will have their locale set to the default Server Site Locale.
  • For detailed information, see Site Regional Settings in Global features in Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010.

    PWA does not support non-Gregorian calendars. If a non-Gregorian calendar is selected, a message will display when accessing PWA instructing the user to follow a link to change to a Gregorian calendar.

• Server User Locale

  • Local users can change their default regional settings by going to the PWA site and following the steps for User Regional Settings in Global features in Windows SharePoint Foundation 2010.

    The Server User Locale dialog is basically the same as the Server Site Locale dialog except it does not have a Sort Order field.

Formatting Behavior

• Server

  • Dates, numbers and sort order

    • The WSS Regional Settings locale is used to specify date, numbers and sort order.
    • It is possible to have a locale not match the language selected. Dates will be rendered using the locale chosen, not the UI language. For example, if the UI language is Japanese, but the Locale is English, the date formats would be in English.

    Do not confuse Locale with Language. Locale does not require any LPKs to be installed, whereas switching Languages in PWA does require at least one LPK to be installed.

  • Currency

    • To set the currency unit, the Administrator would need to navigate to Server Settings > Additional Server Settings.

             

    • Project Server ignores the locale’s currency unit but adheres to the currency format. For example, in Project Server, $50.00 in US Dollars will appear as $50,00 if the locale is set to German. 
    • If you change the currency unit, all lists displaying monetary values created before the change will use the previous currency unit, and all lists displaying monetary valued created after the change will use the new currency unit.

    It is important to note that you can force the currency to be the same for all projects.  If you do that, any project created with a different currency previously will be forced to change the currency symbol the next time the project is saved to the server.

• Client

  • Not connected to PWA

    • Microsoft Project will take all of it formatting from the operating system (OS) regional settings.

  • Connected to PWA

• • • Date, time and number formatting

      • Project opened in client
        • If a project is published to PWA but is opened in the Project client application, then all date, time and number formatting will conform to the OS regional settings.
        • For example, if your PWA locale is Arabic but your OS regional setting is set to Romanian, when the project is opened in the Project client application, it will display with Romanian formatting.
      • Project opened in PWA
        • If a project is published to PWA and is opened in PWA, then all date, time and number formatting will conform to your user account settings in PWA. 
        • For example, if a project is created in Microsoft Project using the Japanese-Japan locale, but Project Server was set to the English-U.S. locale, after the project is saved and published to PWA, all dates and number formats will be rendered to match the English-U.S. locale if the project is opened in PWA.

    • Currency

      • If the server is set to force currency setting, then both server and client will follow the server setting.
      • If the server is not set to force currency setting, then the currency will remain whatever it was originally set to.

 

Language Settings

The WSS Language Settings in Microsoft Project Server allows the Site Administrator to enable any LPKs installed. This section will explain how a user can interact with WSS and PWA pages if any LPKs are installed and what is the expected default behavior.

Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Office MOSS language SKU must be identical for installation to occur. In addition, LPKs can be installed before or after provisioning. If they are installed after provisioning, then the server must be provisioned again.  There are two types of server LPKs available: WSS LPK which only contains WSS components, and MOSS LPK which contains both WSS and Project components.

Site Administrators can enable LPKs after they are installed by doing the following:

1. Drop down Site Actions menu.
2. Select Site Settings.
3. Select Language Settings (under Site Administration)
4. Check the checkboxes of all the alternate languages that should be enabled for PWA site users (see Language Settings dialog below)
5. To overwrite translations, select Yes to automatically apply changes to application content in the primary language to all alternate languages
6. Click OK

 

If alternate languages have been enabled as noted above, local users can change the default UI language by doing the following:

1. Drop down the User Name menu at the top of the page.
2. Select Display Language.
3. Select the preferred language for display (see below).

 

If you have more than one LPK installed, try changing your UI to the various languages.  It’s a great cultural experience.

You should now be able to change the Regional and Language Settings for PWA and know what the expected behavior is.  If you have any questions, let me know by leaving a comment below, and I will get back to you.

Yours truly,

The Professor

PS. A big thanks to Paul Suurs and Grace Sturman of the Office Global Experience Platform team, and Mike Joe of the Project team for their contribution on this article.

The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, or event is intended or should be inferred.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  BlogSpot doesn't appear to be a Microsoft SharePoint site, so I don't know the answer.  I recommend that you direct your question to blogspot's customer service instead - their representatives will have much more information on the BlogSpot service and the settings which are available to you as a customer.

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2010
  how to set my blog tech-caffe.blogspot.com so it always browse in regional language? thanks!

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2012
  aqui vai o meu sinceros agradescimentos a empresa microsoft pela confiabilidade de todos os conceitos inteligentes abordado ficando rexistrado a integridade de plataforma tao diguina e inteligente. por estar tao certo disso sempre estarei pronto e onrrando perpetuamente;

• Anonymous
  October 03, 2013
  I want to add a column on Project Web Access with the field name "Skill Set".How do i do it? I tried to search online,got some answers,but it doesnt seem to work.Kindly help me!