Additional information about WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Language Packs
Answers to some FAQs about WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Language Packs.
What are MOSS Language Packs?
MOSS Language packs enable site owners and site collection administrators to create SharePoint sites and site collections in multiple languages without requiring separate installations of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You install language packs, which contain language-specific site templates, on your front-end Web servers. When an administrator creates a site or a site collection based on a language-specific site template, the text that appears on the site or the site collection is displayed in the site template's language. Language Packs are typically used in multinational deployments where a single server farm supports people in different locations or in situations where sites and Web pages must be duplicated in one or more languages. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Office server product SKU.
What’s the difference between WSS Language Packs and MOSS language Packs?
· WSS Language Packs are for WSS stand-alone installations and enable the creation of SharePoint sites in different languages; multiple language packs can be installed on the same server.
· MOSS Language Packs are for MOSS, MOSS for Search, Forms Server, and Project Server installations and enable the creation of SharePoint sites in different languages; multiple language packs can be installed on the same server.
What’s the difference between a MOSS Language Pack and a fully localized version of MOSS?
Microsoft’s 2007 Office server products are localized into languages in two different ways: 1) fully translated SKUs and 2) Language Packs. A language-specific SKU delivers the respective Office server product localized into a given language. A Language Pack may be applied to an installed Office server product to create sites or site collections in other languages. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Office server product SKU, or the language of the admin features.
How does a customer license them?
MOSS Language Packs can be downloaded and installed on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers free of charge. If the Language Packs deployed fall within your “listed languages” then your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard and Enterprise CALs license your desktops/devices for those Language Packs. If Language Packs deployed fall outside of your “listed languages” then you will need to consider modifying your CAL to a multi-language option (for Select/Open agreements) or an “all languages” option (for Enterprise Agreements).
What’s the pricing?
There is no cost for MOSS Language Packs; however, there may be additional CAL costs associated with licensing for languages outside your listed languages.
Where can I find information on deploying MOSS Language Packs?
The following TechNet articles relate to MOSS Language Pack deployment:
I heard that there are issues related to specific server language packs. What is this about?
For certain languages (Arabic, Hindi and Thai), spellers were not included in either the fully localized version of MOSS or the MOSS Language Pack. (Spellers for Basque and Galician are also absent from the Spanish MOSS and Spanish MOSS Language Pack). These spellers, as well as instructions for installing them, will be made available to customers via the MOSS Server Multi-Language Pack (SMLP). The SMLP will be downloadable from the Microsoft Download Center and MVLS/eOpen web sites. The SMLP is expected to be available towards the end of May 2007. Note: while a customer can obtain any MOSS Language Pack or the SMLP free of charge, they are not necessarily licensed to use all of the languages. They should consult their listed languages for more clarification on which languages they are licensed to use.
[Update April 27, 2007:
Serbian Latin Language Pack installation pre-requisites
Before installing the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Serbian (Latin) Language Pack, please following the instructions below in order to avoid site creation issues.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Serbian (Latin) Language Pack requires the installation of a patch to the .NET 2.0 Framework to provide support for the new Serbian Latin culture (sr-latn-cs) prior to installing the Language Pack. Installing the Language Pack without this patch in place will result in the user being unable to launch Central Admin after installation and further site creation will not be possible. The following is the error message that the user will receive without the patch installed when trying to launch Central Admin:
To obtain this patch, you must contact Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) and request the fix for “KB Article Number: 930771“ since it is not currently available through any other channel.
Serbian Latin Language Pack Publishing Site templates
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Serbian (Latin) Publishing Site templates have an issue with accessing images and style sheets. The user can create publishing sites but will experience poor formatting and display. Microsoft will have a fix available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Service Pack 1 (release date will be announced later). In the meantime, we recommend that customers do not apply workarounds to any of the Publishing Site templates. Doing so will likely prevent successful installation of future product updates such as Service Pack 1.
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