In one of our current projects we had to deal with a multi-server installation in several european locations. The pilot deployment was in German and one installation was in Hungarian. Due to the fact that exported customizations are not compatible between languages, this can create a major problem, especially of you as implementation partner don't understand the target language. What we did was to create a document with a screenshot of every available form and a table underneath with all the fieldnames in language A. We gave this one to a translator so that we had all the forms translated. The implementation contains a lot of custom entities and relations so it would have been quite a hassle to manually recreate all those - especially if you don't understand a single word in the foreign language interface!
Now Michael H�hne from Stunnware came into play who has created a "CRM Localization Tool" which is a .NET application that helps a lot to save much time in such a scenario. Michael released this handy tool as a free utility, but don't forget to at least drop him a line if it was helpful to you. Thanks again Michael for your kind support.
As CRM 4.0 will support multiple languages, this tool will not be needed anymore, as soon as "Titan" is available.
Localization / Language Conversion Tool
New German VPC-Demos (Deutsch Contoso 2007)
This took a while, but the German Version of the VPC Demo for CRM 3.0 using the virtual company "Contoso" is out.
"Contoso ist eine virtuelle Firma, die Unternehmensl�sungen auf Basis von Microsoft-Technologien hervorragend veranschaulicht. Als Dreh- und Angelpunkt eigens konzipierter Demo-DVDs zeigt Contoso weit mehr als 40 Anwenderszenarien auf. Diese Szenarien orientieren sich an den Marketingkampagnen und sind erweiterbar, sodass Sie Ihre eigenen L�sungen und Anwendungen nahtlos integrieren k�nnen."
Download:
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/germany/verkauf/contoso/dvd/downloads.mspx (Partner Login required).
I'm downloading it now and will keep you updated about speed and functionality.
Also a new english VPC-demo will soon be released.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mscrmfreak/archive/2007/06/12/new-microsoft-dynamics-crm-vpc-update.aspx