Gwyneth Marshall from SharePoint Team Blog tell us about future language packs of SharePoint and Office. I was waiting for the officially support of Microsoft for Persian language on the 2007 Office systems and SharePoint technology, but unfortunately I’ll announce you Persian language is not on the timeframes that Gwyneth tell us about.
As you know at least 5 countries uses Persian as their primary language, and it’s language of RUMI & HAFEZ poems.
I made a lot of efforts during 3 years ago contacting Microsoft or one of its localizing partners about supporting Persian in the SharePoint technology, but all of my huge tasks in the past was unsuccessful.
I confused when I get some news about a project localizing Office 2007 & Windows Vista in Persian by a very low budget on the American university of Dubai.
Can you believe this very important project can be handle just by a 10,000$ and using some students of university ?!
As you know Persian is completely different from Arabic and it’s a huge set of very technical tasks about initiating a suitable community by Persian peoples about selecting right words an strings, implementing spell checking, Persian calendar and so on.
We have a Persian LIP for Office 2003 now, prepared on Dubai by an Arabic development team, and if you have any experience about using that, you know that there is a lot of issues, in some cases we get messages that absolutely there is no meaning!
I’m working on the SharePoint technology since 2002 and we have our own Persian language pack for WSS 2 and 3, and we are localizing Office 2007, and all of them will be ready at the exact time of Microsoft release. You can see some of our implementations of WSS 2 in the addresses below, also I’ll be host a Persian WSS 3 for demo next week, and I can give you a workspace for use if you are interested. Main goal of me presenting this sites and hosting a demo site for WSS 3 is to get support of Microsoft for creating a perfect language pack for Persian.
http://talented.mui.ac.ir
http://merc.mui.ac.ir
http://te.mui.ac.ir
http://edcportal.mui.ac.ir
I hope one of Microsoft employees or any related person see this post and tell me a direct way for talking to Microsoft or one of its partners about our passion. If you have any suggestion for me, please let me know.