SharePoint 2010 – Set Regional Settings Time Zone using PowerShell when Provisioning a New Site

As you probably already know SharePoint 2010 has added functionality when dealing with multiple Time Zones.  There are two areas aside form the Web Application level where a user can set this preference.  The first is managed at the site level via the Site Settings > Regional Settings page.

The second is managed at the user level via the My Regional Settings page accessible via the User actions menu where a user can choose a Region other than the one configured at the Site  Level.

So this is easily configured via the browser when you do not have a plethora of sites to provision, but  most projects I work on are fairly large – and many of these are regional implementations, so we typically have scripts to handle large intranet deployments.  So what scripting language do I use?  Why PowerShell of course, and hey the @ScriptingGuys would approve 🙂

With PowerShell you can easily provision SharePoint sites programmatically and configure many of their properties!  One of the properties that we are setting for both MySites (via a Provisioning Receiver) and Location-based sites is the Regional Settings.

Here is a code snippet that allows you to set the Time Zone when provisioning a sub-site based on the Time Zone ID desired.

  $web = New-SPWeb -url ($intraneturl + "/NewDehli") -name "New Dheli"  -Template ($PubPortalGenericTemplate) $web.RegionalSettings.TimeZone.ID = 23 # (UTC+05:30) Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi $web.Update()

Enjoy,
Oscar