Office 2003 Multilingual Deployment Strategies | Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit (Pro-Resource Kit)

Once you select the Microsoft Office 2003 multilingual resources to use for your organization, you need to choose an appropriate deployment strategy. Your strategy will depend on the structure of your organization and the languages your users need, and will likely consider whether you:

Deploy from a centralized administrative location.

Customize an installation of Office with the language resources required by a specific area in your company—for example, add the German Multilingual User Interface Pack for a division located in Germany. Then deploy the custom installation from a centralized administrative location—for example, a server at the central office in London.
Distribute Office to subsidiaries to deploy from there.

Deploy to your international administrative departments and allow the administrative department in each subsidiary to customize the installation to meet its language needs.
Choose one or several administrative installation points in your Office deployment.

Using one administrative installation point might enable a more centralized deployment strategy, while using several might provide flexibility for several local customizations.
Time your multilingual customizations to fall before, with, or after an Office deployment, and choose whether to use deployment tools such as Group Policy software installation or Microsoft Systems Management Server.

If you have chosen to deploy a localized version of Office 2003, you customize and deploy that version just as you do an English version.

Deploying multilingual features from a central administrative location

If your organization uses one administrative group to deploy Office to the entire organization, you can make all the customizations at your headquarters and deploy directly to users internationally. In this scenario, you customize the Microsoft Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI Pack) and create a custom installation of Office for the language needs in each area. Users in each area then install the custom configuration for that area. (If you deploy more than one custom configuration, you can choose to use one or more administrative installation points.)

For example, if you are deploying Microsoft Office 2003 with the Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI Pack) to users in the United States and Canada, you might create four separate customized Office deployments as follows:

For English-speaking users in the United States, customize the installation to install only proofing tools from the MUI Pack and enable languages for editing as needed.
For Spanish-speaking users in the United States, customize the MUI Pack to install Spanish language features from the MUI Pack, leave the installation language set at U.S. English, set the user interface and Help language to Spanish, and enable Spanish for editing (English is automatically enabled for editing if the installation language is English).
For users in English-speaking Canadian provinces, set the installation language to Canadian English, and enable Canadian French and Canadian English for editing.
For users in QuŽbec, install the French MUI Pack, set the installation language to Canadian French, set the user interface and Help language to French, and enable Canadian French and Canadian English for editing.

Deploying Office from a subsidiary

If your organization’s administrative resources are distributed internationally, each local subsidiary can modify the standard installation for local users.

In this case, a central corporate administrative group supplies each local office with a standard Windows Installer transform (MST file) for Office 2003 with the installation language set to English. The transform might include certain Office customizations (standardized for the whole corporation). Then local administrators customize the MUI Pack (creating a MUI Pack transform), select language settings, and modify the Office 2003 transform for the language needs in their area.

For example, if you are a site administrator in Hong Kong, you might customize the corporate deployment as follows:

Customize the Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese MUI Packs to install Traditional and Simplified Chinese language features on users’ computers.
Customize the language settings to set English or Traditional Chinese as the language for the user interface and online Help; set the installation language to Traditional Chinese; and enable Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and U.K. English for editing.
Modify the Office 2003 transform (before deploying Office 2003) to customize Office applications for Hong Kong users.

For example, add a button to the toolbar in Microsoft Office Word 2003 for converting between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Choosing one or multiple administrative installation points

You can use a single centralized administrative installation point for Office 2003, the Multilingual User Interface Pack, or Microsoft Office 2003 Proofing Tools. Or you can deploy Office from one installation point, and deploy one or more MUI Packs (or proofing tools) from additional installation points. It can be easier to manage deployment from a single administrative installation point. However, there are scenarios in which using multiple installation points is a preferred method.

For example, suppose you are deploying several different sets of languages to groups in different parts of your organization. In this scenario, you might choose to use different installation points for these groups to avoid using large amounts of hard disk space when you replicate a single administrative installation point image to multiple locations around the world.

Timing your installation of multilingual features

You can chain installations of the Multilingual User Interface Pack or Proofing Tools with your Office 2003 installation. Or you can deploy Office first, and deploy other multilingual features later.

For example, if you are ready to deploy Office 2003 right away but the MUI Pack for a particular language is not yet available, you might still proceed with your Office deployment and then deploy the additional MUI Pack when it becomes available.

To learn more about options for coordinating your installation of language resources with your Office deployment, see “Customizing and Installing Office 2003 MUI Packs” in Chapter 14, “Deploying Office 2003 Multilingual Resources.”

Use Systems Management Server to deploy Office with multilingual options

Systems Management Server (SMS) provides a flexible and powerful tool for deploying software. You can deploy Office with the Multilingual User Interface Pack or Proofing Tools with Systems Management Server. First, you customize your Office installation by using the Custom Installation Wizard to create transforms for Office and the multilingual features you are deploying. Then you deploy Office by creating SMS packages and distributing them to selected clients.

You cannot control the order in which components are deployed with Systems Management Server. Because of this, you must set the CHECKINSTALLORDER property to FALSE when configuring your MUI Pack or Office Proofing Tools deployment. This allows the MUI Pack or Proofing Tools to be installed even if Office is not.

For more information on using SMS to deploy Office, see “Using SMS 2.0 to Deploy Microsoft Office XP” on the Microsoft TechNet Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sms/deploy/depopt/smsoffxp.asp.

Use Windows software installation to deploy Office with multilingual options

In Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP or later, Group Policy provides a software installation and management solution designed to support Windows 2000 or Windows XP clients.

By default, Office must be installed before MUI Pack files are installed. However, when you deploy using Group Policy or using Microsoft Systems Management Server, you cannot specify the order in which components are installed. To help prevent installation errors, you set a property (CHECKINSTALLORDER) when you configure your Office installation. This property allows Office files, MUI Pack files, and proofing tools files to be installed in any order.

For more information about using Group Policy software installation, see “Using Group Policy to Deploy Office” in Chapter 5, “Installing Office 2003.”