You configure multilingual sites in your hierarchy by using any combination of the seven languages supported for SMS site servers. This increased flexibility, combined with support for 24 client languages, greatly improves your ability to centrally manage a multilingual SMS site hierarchy while meeting the local-language needs of your organization.
For example, consider a company whose headquarters is located in Vancouver, Canada, with branch offices in Tokyo and Amsterdam. The branch offices are all child sites of the parent headquarters site. The SMS site administrators configure the central, primary site system in Vancouver to use an English-language site server running an English-language SMS Administrator console. The Vancouver site also supports English-language and French-language clients. At the Tokyo site, the SMS administrators use Japanese-language SMS Administrator consoles on Japanese localized site servers to support Japanese-language clients. The Amsterdam site runs an English-language site server that supports a mix of Dutch-language and English-language clients. At the central site in Vancouver, the SMS administrators can view the information of each of the child sites in the native languages and character sets, of each of the child sites.
To obtain the required client language support, the SMS administrators install the International Client Packs (ICPs) that contained the client languages they required. In this case, ICP 2 is required. For a list of client languages contained within each ICP, see Table 3.3. For more information about ICPs, see “International Client Packs” later in this chapter.
The SMS site administrators of our example company choose this configuration to take advantage of many of the new international features of SMS 2.0. Because SMS 2.0 supports DBCS languages, it supports Japanese (a double-byte character set language) child sites reporting to the English (a single-byte character set language) central site. The European branch has client user interfaces enabled with several central, western, and eastern European languages that are deployed by installing ICP 4.
For the site administrators, the advantage of this configuration is to have broad administrative coverage of the company’s information systems. This capability makes it possible for administrators to store all of their SMS information for the company in one location and to view the data in the native language from each site, from any location, through remote SMS Administrator consoles. Because the site administrators can use any mix of the seven supported server languages, they have considerable flexibility in designing their site hierarchy to suit the needs of their organization. The English-language site server can support all of the SMS client languages.