How to Modify the Default Browser Language Settings for Outlook Web Access

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When they use Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5 or later versions to access Outlook Web Access, new installations and upgrades to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 use the browser's language settings to determine the character set to use to encode information, such as e-mail messages and meeting requests.

If you upgrade a server running Exchange 2000 Server that was modified to use a browser's language setting, Exchange Server 2003 continues to function in the same manner. The following table lists the language groups and respective character sets.

Outlook Web Access language group and character sets

Language group Character set

Arabic

Windows 1256

Baltic

iso-8859-4

Chinese (Simplified)

Gb2131

Chinese (Traditional)

Big5

Cyrillic

koi8-r

Eastern European

iso-8859-2

Greek

iso-8859-7

Hebrew

windows-1255

Japanese

iso-2022-jp

Korean   

ks_c_5601-1987

Thai

windows-874

Turkish

iso-8859-9

Vietnamese

windows-1258

Western European

iso-8859-1

If you expect Outlook Web Access users in your organization to send mail frequently, you can modify registry settings so that users who are running Internet Explorer 5 or later versions can use UTF-8-encoded Unicode characters to send mail.

Before You Begin

Note

Incorrectly editing the registry can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Problems resulting from editing the registry incorrectly may not be able to be resolved. Before editing the registry, back up any valuable data.

Procedure

To modify the default language setting for Outlook Web Access

  1. On the Exchange server, log on with the Exchange administrator account, and start Registry Editor (regedit).

  2. In Registry Editor, locate the following registry key:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\
MSExchangeWEB\OWA\UseRegionalCharset

  3. Create a DWORD value named UseRegionalCharset.

  4. Right-click the UseRegionalCharset DWORD value, and then click Modify.

  5. In Edit DWORD Value, in the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

For More Information

For information about managing and configuring Outlook Web Access, see the following topics: