11 Languages MUI out of the box

Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server will soon be available in 11 languages: US English, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. This is the same set of languages that were available in Forefront Security for Exchange Server 2007 but there is a big difference. In the 2007 release the product was single language, which means you had to choose which language you wanted and stick with it. In the 2010 release we are using multilingual technologies to simplify the user experience.

How does it work from a user's perspective? It is easier than ever, just download “the” package for Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server (there is only 1 package, no need to choose a language) and run it. If your language is in the list, the product will display everything in the language you are currently using. If your language is not in the list, it will be displayed in English.

Multilingual technologies can be particularly helpful for very large multinational organizations distributed geographically. Imagine a mail security administrator working in the US feeling right at home because everything shows up in English; then when the 24x7 shift changes and it is time for the administrator working in Japan to work with the product, he will be able to run it comfortably in Japanese; finally when the administrator in France takes over, she will have no difficulties because the product will be displayed in French. We are talking about the same installation of the product, running in the same machine, not multiple installs. This benefit is directly available from the default installation; there are no additional patches or language packs to apply.

The language displayed is based on the user settings in Windows. For the above scenario to work correctly, all that needs to be done is for each administrator to have different accounts and use the control panel in Windows to select their language (which we expect to be the case for the multinational scenario described here).

The only caveat I should mention in our multilingual scenario is in the defaults for user-configurable text, for example, the message that is sent out as a replacement when a virus is detected. This text is configured at install time using the language for the person running setup. Users can later configure it to any language they want, possibly a multilingual message if appropriate, but that is a manual step that needs to be done afterwards. The language used at install time will also affect minor items such as names in the Start menu and service names.

There are a few questions that may arise due to these localization changes:

Q: Can I see a different language on a server running a localized administrator console? For example, can I view the English Forefront administrator console on a server where Windows is configured to display German text?

A: Yes, the Forefront administrator console will be displayed in the language of the current user. Even if the server is configured to display German text by default, you can access the server using an account configured for displaying English. Forefront will respect the account preferences rather than the server default.

Q: I only need one language, so how will this change impact disk space on my server? Can I just delete the other language packs?

A: The language packs take up about 4 MB per language, which should not have a big impact on your server. If you do need to free up some space, you can delete the language files that are not used.

For example, if the ja-jp, de-de, fr-fr, it-it, es-es, ko-kr, zh-cn, zh-tw pt-br and ru-ru folders are all deleted, the only effect is that the program will always be displayed in English but everything else in Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server will run exactly the same as it did before deleting the folders.

Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

Forefront Server Protection