Proofing Tools Kit deployment to a multilingual environment - Do’s and Don’ts

  • Article

Picture the following scenario: you need to roll out a Proofing Tools for Office to a multilingual organization, with various branch offices throughout the world. What is the best solution in this case? The answer is the Proofing Tools Kit for Office. It contains spelling and grammar checkers, thesauruses, and AutoCorrect lists that help users create and edit Office documents in more than 30 languages, and you only need one kit, unlike in the case of opting for Language Packs.

Before you start the deployment, you need to answer to a few questions:

 

  • Does Office already have a Language Pack applied? Unlike in the case of language packs deployment, the Proofing Tools Kit does not have the ability to match shell UI, not being able therefore to adapt to he language of the OS.
  • Do you plan to install all languages in the Proofing Tools Kit? If not, then the config.xml you use should contain just the languages you want to install. If you want each branch office to receive just the language that it needs, then you need to create a config.xml adequate to each branch office; for example, if you have 5 branch offices in 5 different countries, you need to create 5 different config.xml files. This also implies that you will use 5 different commands for installation. This may be time consuming, but the advantage is that size on disk will be smaller, even though the whole Proofing Tools Kit will always be cached locally.

After you’ve clarified the above aspects, you can start configuring your config.xml. You can use the default config.xml from in the installation package; it should be stored in the folder ProofKit.WW. Just to get an idea of how the main syntax looks like, a good starting point would be the following sample:

 

<Configuration Product="Proofkit">

<OptionState Id="ProofingTools_1027" State="Absent" Children="force"/> -> this is for the languages you do not want to install

<OptionState Id="ProofingTools_1069" State="Local" Children="force"/> -> this is for the languages you want to install from the Proofing Tools Kit

</Configuration>

Depending on the language you are interested in rolling out, set the corresponding language ID to state "Absent" | "Advertise" | "Local" . Absent will not install that language, Advertise will install it on first run, and Local will install it whenever you run setup.exe together the config.xml.

The following article may come in handy if you want to know what language ID you should use for each language - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179219(v=office.14).

After your config.xml is customized, deploy it using the following command:

setup.exe /config <path to config.xml>\PTKconfig.xml

 

Speaking of Good-to-know things, you should also be aware that when you install the Microsoft Office Proofing Tools Kit on a computer that has Input Method Editor 2010 installed, and then you log on to the computer for the first time, the keyboard layout is configured for an Asian language unexpectedly. The good news however is that this issue was addressed in the following hotfix - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598278.

 

Getting to the Don’ts part, there are a few concerns around the deployment of the Proofing Tools Kit which sometimes lead to un-recommended workarounds. One of the major issues encountered in this scenario is that the Proofing Tools Kit always caches locally and that can be an inconvenient for the organizations which want to avoid high network load. There is however no way of preventing the Proofing Tools Kit
from caching, and then the following question comes up – “Is it supported to extract single .msi packages out of the Proofing Tools Kit and deploy them individually?” Answer is unfortunately negative – it is not recommended nor supported to extract just the .msi files of the languages we are interested in.

But when network traffic is a concern, there is another supported workaround which we can consider. The best option in this scenario is to use Language Packs instead of the Proofing Tools Kit Compilation. This
reason for this is that you can deploy each language pack separately to each subsidiary, without being forced to cache locally all the 37 languages ofOffice. Also, the language pack is smaller in size than the Proofing Tools Kit.

As a bonus, each Language Pack contains 2 or more additional companion languages. You can find useful information about the 37 language packs available for Office 2010 (and their companion languages) here:

Office 2010 - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee942198(v=office.14).aspx

Office 2013 - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee942198(v=office.15).aspx