Deploying Office in a Multinational Setting

Deploying Microsoft Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack gives you the advantage of having a single installation of Office for your entire international organization. However, due to limitations of some plug-in language features, you might decide to deploy localized versions of Office 2000 in some language-speaking areas.

Advantages of installing localized versions of Office

Some features in Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack cannot switch the language of their user interface. If it is important that users run these features in their own language, you can deploy a localized version of Office to these users. Localized versions of Office 2000 are based on the same international core as Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack, so users can exchange documents between language versions of Office 2000 with no loss of data.

There are some differences between running Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack and running a localized version of Office. For example:

• The Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack cannot switch the user interface language of Microsoft Map in Microsoft Excel, Excel add-ins, some OCX controls, and some Help elements (such as dialog boxes and the Contents tab).
• In Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack, shortcuts on the Start menu are not localized.
• Localized versions of Office include more localized templates and wizards than are provided in the MultiLanguage Pack.

Toolbox   You can look up information about which Office features cannot switch the language of their user interface in an Excel workbook named Intlimit.xls available in the International Information section of the downloads page as a compressed image file named Internat.exe. You can find this downloadable file on the Office 2000 Resource Kit Downloads page.

Disadvantages of installing localized versions of Office

There are some drawbacks to deploying localized versions of Office rather than standardizing on a single version. With separate versions, you need separate procedures for deployment, support, and administration. Also, localized versions do not usually support the ability to switch the language of the user interface.

However, some localized versions of Office 2000 provide limited ability to switch the language of the user interface. You can switch the language of the user interface to English in the following localized versions of Office 2000:

• Arabic
• Hebrew
• Pan-Chinese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese
• Japanese
• Korean
• Thai

In the Arabic version of Office 2000, you can also switch the user interface to French. In the Pan-Chinese (Hong Kong) version, you can switch most Office 2000 applications to Simplified Chinese (except for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft FrontPage®) if the user is running Microsoft Windows NT.

Depending on your needs, you can deploy a localized version of Office 2000 in selected language-speaking areas. For example, you might deploy Office 2000 with MultiLanguage Pack everywhere except Japan, where you deploy the Japanese version of Office 2000.