Date format in Regional Settings

Posted January 15, 2009

Okay – to keep up with the number GP related postings here (I’ve been busy writing and learning AD internals – you may have noticed), I’m gonna quote my fellow Group Policy MVP Mark Heitbrink (http://www.gruppenrichtlinien.de – German Group Policy “Portal”) on an answer to a newsgroup question (http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.group_policy/browse_thread/thread/12a9b243066c6e0a).

The main question was: Can I change the date format with Group Policy? Mark’s answer was a custom ADM template from his site:

---- dateformat.adm ----
CLASS USER
CATEGORY "Control Panel"
   POLICY "Change Date format"
   KEYNAME "Control Panel\International"
      PART "Select format" DROPDOWNLIST
REQUIRED
         VALUENAME sShortdate
            ITEMLIST
; This is German local, so change the next 2 lines to your settings !
               NAME "TT.MM.JJJJ" VALUE "dd.MM.yyyy" DEFAULT
               NAME "TT.MM.JJ" VALUE "dd.MM.yy"
; NAME = Display, VALUE = Setting in the Registry !
             END ITEMLIST
      END PART
END POLICY
END CATEGORY
---- dateformat.adm ----

That’s it. Cool, isn’t it? Note the remark between the “ITEMLIST” keywords. The example shows the German format, dd.MM.yyyy which stands for dayday.Month.Year; June the 2nd this year would be 02.06.2009. You may change that to whatever you’re favorite format is. US folks would prefer MM/dd/yyyy, I suppose, so you’d change one of the lines to

NAME “MM/dd/yyyy” VALUE “MM/dd/yyyy”

Don’t forget to switch the filtering so that you can see the preference in GPE: right-click the “Control Panel” folder and choose “View->Filtering”. Then un-check the “Only show…” boxes.

Another way of doing all this would be using GP Preferences. It has a native UI for Regional Settings:

gpp_regionalsettings1

It lets you choose from a bunch of items. Don’t forget to switch the red/green underlining so that your settings get actually applied. Pressing F6 with the selected item helps us change the red dottet line (ignore setting on client) to green (apply setting on client):

gpp_regionalsettings2

More on the red/green underlining feature can be read here:

http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=126 and here: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=136

Posted in Group Policy

No Comment