Simon Hutson - Post on Multi Language

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Tidbits - Multi-Lingual UI
Forsaken...
It is widely known that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 supports MUI (Multi-Lingual User Interface), but what does this mean in practice? Well for starters each CRM deployment will have a base language, which means if you are upgrading from the Spanish language version of CRM 3.0 then you will need to install the Spanish language version of CRM 4.0.
However, now you can add additional language packs to your deployment such as English, French etc. The following language will be available for CRM 4.0 and similar to CRM 3.0, we will be releasing them in multiple waves, with wave 1 available at RTM and subsequent waves every few weeks thereafter:

Wave 1 - English, German, Spanish, Dutch, French
Wave 2 - Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Italian, Finnish
Wave 3 - Japanese, Hebrew, Swedish, Nowegian
Wave 4 - Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Portuguese (Brazil)
Wave 5 - Czech, Polish, Hugarian, Chinese (Traditional)
Wave 6 - Greek, Korean, Chinese (Pan)
Wave 7 - Arabic

Once the langauge packs are installed, they need to be enabled by the CRM administrator. Remember that CRM 4.0 is also multi-tennant aware which means a single deployment can support one or more instances of CRM, and each instance has its own administrator. It is quite possible to have two instances of CRM on the same deployment, each with different languages enabled.

Finally, once the CRM administrator has enabled the appropriate language packs, each user chooses their prefered language.

So what excatly get's the MUI treatment? As you would expect menus, navigation labels, form lables and picklists are fully translated. But what about reports, e-mail templates, KB articles etc as these are language-spcific. Well, with all the out-of--box reports & templates, we ship the appropriate language version of these with each language pack. If you have created your own then you have a couple of choices once you have upgraded to CRM 4.0:

Leave these alone and just use a single base language
Copy your orignals and create language-specific reports & templates
CRM is intelligent enough to know that if a version of a report is available in the user-selected language then it will chose this, otherwise it will chose the version of the report in the base language. The same thing happens when you create custom attributes and form labels. If no translation is available, then CRM will default to the base language.
Oh, just in case you were wondering, no user data is translated at any time - that would be just plain silly.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Laughing Boy
Posted: Monday, October 01, 2007 4:44 PM by simonhu
Filed under: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0