Office 365 in Arabic - Arabization – Part I
In this article, we will answer the following questions:
- How can we use Arabic in Office 365? What fields can be Arabic?
- How can we manage Arabic users?
Let’s start from the beginning, company wants to utilize Office 365 and everything expected to be in Arabic, so first question:
1. What are the fields that supported to be Arabic?
The answer is you can create users with everything in Arabic (even the display name) except the User Name and the Password that should be in English, check the following snapshot:
Having all users in Arabic will result in having the Global Address List (GAL) with Arabic in all fields, which will be great to match the customer request, check the following snapshot:
And in Lync Arabic is also supported in search and display:
Let’s move to more advanced question how can we manage users with Arabic?
If you will use the portal to manage users, Arabic will be ok with you, also you can search in Arabic:
You can also manage Exchange from the portal and Arabic is supported even in the search, check the following snapshot:
However, the main issue here is when using PowerShell to manage Office 365:
The above is expected because PowerShell doesn’t support Unicode characters, thus Arabic is not supported in PowerShell and we will get the hieroglyphic characters 
.
The solution for that is to use Windows PowerShell Integrating Scripting Environment (ISE).
Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a host application that enables you to write, run, and test scripts and modules in a graphical and intuitive environment. Key features in Windows PowerShell ISE include syntax-coloring, tab completion, Intellisense, visual debugging, Unicode compliance, and context-sensitive Help, and provide a rich scripting experience.
PowerShell ISE is installed by default in Windows 8, for Windows 7 and 2008 R2 can be downloaded from Microsoft Download Center: Windows Management Framework 3.0
PowerShell ISE is very useful tool; you can get more information about it from this URL:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849182.aspx
For our problem the main advantage is the support of Unicode Language, thus ISE will be perfect to manage Office 365 and get all the Arabic characters:
Also can be used to modify any attribute in Arabic as the following snapshot:
In this blog we answered how can we use Arabic in Office 365, what fields are supported in Arabic, and how can we manage Office 365 users created in Arabic, in the following article we will go through more advanced topics in managing and administering Office 365 tenant and of course in Arabic Language.
Other Parts:
Part I: Arabic Problems
Part II: Users Bulk Creation
Part III: Users Bulk Modification