Send Microsoft Teams meeting invitations in multiple languages

• Author
• Recent Posts

Roland Eich

Roland Eich is an IT specialist for system integration and has been working in IT for over 10 years as a system administrator. His areas of expertise are Windows Server and IT infrastructures. Certifications: MCITP EA, MCSA and MCSE.

Latest posts by Roland Eich (see all)

• Microsoft Graph: A single (PowerShell) API for Microsoft’s cloud services - Tue, Aug 23 2022
• Exchange impersonation: Grant permissions to service accounts - Mon, Aug 8 2022
• Send Microsoft Teams meeting invitations in multiple languages - Thu, Jul 21 2022

As a rule, invitations in Teams are sent in the default language of the respective tenant. However, it is possible to invite participants to an appointment in another language. In our example, they're sent in English and German.

Currently, the feature does not yet appear in the Teams Admin Center; hence, it has to be configured via PowerShell. I assume that, at some point, this option will be managed in the web console (under Meeting Policies).

Get current setting with PowerShell

First, you need to connect to Teams using PowerShell. This is done using the following cmdlet:

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

If this cannot be executed, then the Teams module is probably missing. You can install it with this command:

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -Force -AllowClobber

Now you should be able to connect to Teams.

Authentication for PowerShell access to Microsoft Teams

You will then see the account and the tenant ID.

After connecting to Teams PowerShell displays the tenants account and ID

Now you can use the following:

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy

This cmdlet searches for meeting policies in the tenant. When you do this, a pretty long list should appear in the output.

Viewing Teams meeting policies with PowerShell

The Identity parameter can be used to narrow down the search. In our case, we need a policy called Global, which contains the settings for the entire organization:

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global | select MeetingInviteLanguages

The parameter used to set the language for the appointment invitations is called MeetingInviteLanguages. By default, no value is assigned to it.

By default the MeetingInviteLanguages property in the meeting guidelines does not contain a value

Assigning languages to MeetingInviteLanguages

Call the following cmdlet to set the languages:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -MeetingInviteLanguages "de-DE,en-GB"

Set languages for the Global meeting policy

The following language codes are currently available for this feature:

ar-SA, az-Latn-AZ, bg-BG, ca-ES, cs-CZ, cy-GB, da-DK, de-DE, el-GR, en-GB, en-US, es-ES, es-MX, et-EE, eu-ES, fi-FI, fil-PH, fr-CA, fr-FR, gl-ES, he-IL, hi-IN, hr- HR, hu-HU, id-ID, is-IS, it-IT, ja-JP, ka-GE, kk-KZ, ko-KR, lt-LT, lv-LV, mk-MK, ms-MY, nb-NO, nl-NL, nn-NO, pl-PL, pt-BR, pt-PT, ro-RO, ru-RU, sk-SK, sl-SL, sq-AL, sr-Latn-RS, sv-SE, th-TH, tr-TR, uk-UA, vi-VN, zh-CN, zh-TW

Of course, you can apply this setting to meeting policies other than Global and thus specifically narrow it down to certain users and groups. In this way, different language packages can be specified depending on the region.

In the Global policy, the MeetingInviteLanguages parameter should now contain the codes for German and English.

Verify the change in the MeetingInviteLanguages property

Limited to two languages

If you try to enter more than two languages, PowerShell will tell you that this is not supported.

Entering more than two language codes results in an error

In larger tenants, it can take a few minutes until the setting is active.

Send multilingual invitations

Now users and admins don't have to do anything when sending a new Teams meeting to make it multilingual.

Invitation to a Teams meeting in German and English

The invitation text automatically appears in the configured languages.

Conclusion

International companies have the option of sending invitations to teams in a local language, in addition to the global corporate language. This is useful to employees who lack knowledge of foreign languages.

This feature can only be managed via PowerShell; management via the Teams Admin Center is unfortunately not yet possible.