European and Middle Eastern languages, including those based on the Greek, Roman, Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic alphabets, can be represented by 256 or fewer characters. Therefore, the characters in these languages can be encoded in a single 8-bit byte; sets of such characters are called single-byte character sets (SBCS). Languages with more than 256 characters require two 8-bit bytes to encode the set; such sets are called double-byte character sets (DBCSs). Ideogramic languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, which use thousands of ideograms rather than letters to represent the written language, are displayed using DBCSs.
The DBCS support provided by SMS 2.0 allows for communication to take place between SBCS and DBCS site servers. This functionality is important because it enables you to use a single site hierarchy to centrally manage your SBCS and DBCS sites (for example, you can centrally manage an English-language central site and a Japanese-language child site), rather than maintaining two separate site hierarchies (an English-language site hierarchy and a Japanese-language hierarchy) to manage these sites, as SMS 1.2 required.
In addition to providing support for both DBCS and SBCS servers, SMS is available in several language packages that provide different combinations of default server and client component language support. For example, the German-language package of SMS provides a German-language server user interface that supports German-language and English-language clients, while the French-language package of SMS provides a French-language server user interface that supports French-language clients.