| Product enablement: Bridging the technology divide |
Indian language enablement now spans most Microsoft products, such as
- Windows XP
- Office XP
- SQL
- Access
- FrontPage
- Publisher
- Windows Server 2003
- SPS
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| The aim here has been that a user should be able to work with any of Microsoft's products, irrespective of the language he/she would like to work in. |
Using the above products and others, therefore, a user could work with, or have developed any of the following (and others) possible tasks:
- Multilingual office productivity
- Sorting and searching according to Indian language rules
- Spell checks and auto correct
- Find and Replace
- Multilingual presentations
- Naming files and folders and performing search at OS level in various languages
- Sending emails and using Outlook
- Calendaring and date options
- Page numbering
- Data analysis
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| Standards evangelism: Providing value to users |
Indian Language support in Microsoft products is categorized by the following USPs:
- It is based on Unicode. Non-standard char encoding formats have been the reason that despite having hundreds of 'font' based solutions available, Indian language users cannot exchange even basic information in their own language. Unicode, which is the only international standard for information exchange, has been comprehensively adopted by Microsoft for Indian languages as well.
- It is based on the new path-breaking font technology called Open Type that has been jointly developed by Microsoft & Adobe. Allowing Indian language font manufacturers to create fonts that can have as many glyphs as needed now translates into great matra alignments and conjunct formations. Microsoft's Hindi fonts for instance have 400+ glyphs as compared to 225 odd in any 8- bit font In addition, Microsoft has tied up with national font developers to provide their font libraries in Unicode/Open type formats.
- It is provided at the very core. Unlike skin-based softwares, which run atop Windows and then atop Office, Indian language support is provided at the OS level. This allows users of Indian languages to experience the core features of Windows and Office for their own language.
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| Developer support: investing in partners |
| Standards based training: Microsoft works with various developers of Indian language products to ensure that the applications they create are in consonance with WW accepted standards and that they have the necessary information to use the latest technology. |
To make this happen, Microsoft has done the following in the last 3 years:
- Multi-city Unicode based workshop
- Indic application development training
- Open Type font development workshop in US (sponsored 12 developers from India)
- Dissemination of information
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| Community & ecosystem build-up |
| In the last 3 years, Microsoft India has carried out a huge amount of public information dissemination service, which has resulted in raising public awareness about Indian languages. |
| A good example of this endeavor are the multilingual public websites: |
| Office Hindi website : http://www.microsoft.com/india/office/indic/hindi/uni/ |
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| Windows Hindi website : http://www.microsoft.com/India/windowsxp/hindi/uni/ |
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