Quick case from the home front: I needed to deploy Windows 10 and Office 365 in a multi lingual environment with a start menu filled with the Office suite.
On a neutral (English) base, I placed my icons on the start menu and then captured the result for a later deployment.
All went good until I tried to deploy using another language: two icons where always missing: Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business!
Where was the gotcha ? It lied in the business.. Literally..!! The word “business” was translated during Office installation, so for example, Skype for Business was changed to Skype Entreprise when deployed on a French Windows. And as my start menu was captured with English icons, they never show up.
How to fix this is easy:
- You can create a localized start menu for every languages (please don’t do that !!)
- You can change the name of the Office short links after they are installed.
Changing short-link’s name can be done with a simple Powershell script like this:
##== Rename Skype
$Name = (Get-ChildItem "$env:ALLUSERSPROFILE\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\*skype*.lnk").FullName
Rename-Item -Path $Name -NewName "Skype for Business 2016.lnk"
##== Rename OneDrive
$Name = (Get-ChildItem "$env:ALLUSERSPROFILE\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\*OneDrive*.lnk").FullName
Rename-Item -Path $Name -NewName "OneDrive for Business.lnk"
and should be placed anywhere in your task sequence but after your Office 365 installation.
Now that the work around is applied, every icons from the suite should display what-ever language you choose.
Limitations : This will not works if you deploy languages that use a different alphabet but I guess that method one (yes that boring capture in every language) should do the job!
Pew, that was real fun super easy life saving engineering, now let’s see if I can convince that baby to eat his vegetables.