Hi,
I'm not sure why this is not an issue for more users, but it surely is a showstopper for deploying Azure AD Join:
when a Windows 10 device is joined to Azure Active Directory, the logon process creates the user's folder in this location: c:\users (as might be expected, this becomes the %USERPROFILE% path). The folder name appears to be constructed based on the user's First name and Last name, as entered in the Azure Active Directory.
However, when the user's first name or last name in the Azure Active Directory includes non-ASCII international characters (for ex. šđčćž), these will be included in the folder name. Although that's not a problem by itself, it generates a range of problems for a huge number of applications typically relying on %APPDATA% to store important settings. The applications having problems include Microsoft Office, Outlook, Google Drive, MS Teams, Skype and so on and they typically fail during either installation or startup.
The workaround is to change the First and Last name fields in Azure AD (prior to first time logon) so they contain only ASCII characters, or alternatively change the %USERPROFILE% folder name in the registry, but that's only a workaround to a bug.
Wouldn't it be logical to correct this so the logon process creates the %USERPROFILE% folder names stripped of any non-ASCII characters, as the majority Windows applications clearly do not tolerate non-ASCII characters in the user profile folder name?
Have any other users notice this behavior?
Thanks for any feedback.