- Posted by sondreb on February 7, 2008
-
If you have read my blog before, you might have read my post about Internationalization and localization. Here I go again with the same topic but this time I'm covering 4 different Microsoft products:
Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
Windows Live Services (Beta)
Microsoft SharedView Beta
Microsoft FolderShare
This is not an in-depth review or test of neither of these products to see how well they work in regards to internationalization and localization, but a summary of the problems I'm experiencing with these products and services. Let's get started...
Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
Today I did my first installation of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition. I was installing it on a brand new x64 Dell server and we wanted to use Hyper-V (Virtual Server) to run some virtual machines.
In the Release Notes for Hyper-V, our specific PowerEdge 2950 with Intel processor have been tested extensively and is suited to be used with Hyper-V. Awesome! To bad I did not read the Release Notes until AFTER I had made the first installation. This is located somewhere in the middle of the release notes:
Configuration requirements
Configure the physical server as follows:
- An installation of Windows Server® 2008 Standard, Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise, or Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter, en-us Locale only.
After the first installation (fast install) and reboot (which was very fast, renamed the machine) I configured the machine with a single role: Hyper-V. Opened up the Virtual Manager but there was no option to add a new Virtual Machine? I was wondering what was going on and all... took a while until I noticed that one of the Windows Services was not running. I tried to start it, but it kept throwing an error message back. Did a quick search on the web, and found out a problem with culture (language) settings for people that had tried to install a beta version of Windows Server 2008. But mine was RTM - how come the culture settings is crashing Hyper-V?
So... I figured I had to do a second installation of Windows Server 2008 and this time I left the culture and language settings to the default: English US.
Second installation finished, I configured the Hyper-V role and now everything works fine. I'm happy... but I wasted some hours on this stupid problem.
What will administrators that configure a whole server, with Active Directory, Application Server, DNS, DHCP, and all the other features say when they come to the step to install Hyper-V... and nothing works? I'm sure there is a simpler solution than reinstalling the whole server, but I did try to change the culture in regional settings with no luck.
PS: Remember that vitalization is disabled by default in the BIOS!
Windows Live Service (Beta)
Before we move on, let's figure out how you can get access to Microsoft SharedView beta. This is a product that is somewhat similar to TeamViewer (which is a great remote assistance/presentation software). TeamViewer goes through any firewall/NAT network configurations so you can always rely on it. Let's hope SharedView is somewhat better than Remote Assistance in Windows which doesn't get you very far without configuring your firewalls and routers.
I'm from Norway (a country in Europe, not part of the European Union/EU) and many of my blog readers is from Norway. We have characters in our alphabet that is not in the English ASCI character-set.
If you open your browser's language settings (Tools/Options/Languages on IE7) you can prioritize and add new languages that you want your browser to submit to all the websites that you visit. Proper internationalized websites will read the browser language settings and render the proper content for you. Microsoft is very good at making good use of this and many of their sites and services is available on many languages.
But - let's try and configure Norwegian Bokmål (nb-NO) as our primary browser language and visit:
http://ideas.live.com/
And clicking on the "More betas" link shows not a single extra beta service...
See the same pages when you configure your browser to use US English as language:
Obviously the user experience for Norwegians (or Swedish, Danish, or any other non-American customer) is less than what you'd expect it to be. Most Norwegians are very good at English and everything when I have the option to choose between Norwegian and English, I choose English. When I watch a DVD, I always choose English subtitles if available. The Norwegian translations is usually horrible and you just end up being nagged by the poor translations. Which reminds - why are so many movies without English subtitles, and why do they often only include English subtitles for hearing-impaired?
Microsoft SharedView Beta
On the more betas page, you can open the Microsoft SharedView Beta 2 page that contains a link to download the installation. But - you only see this page if your language is set to English.
Hint: Use the following link to download Microsoft SharedView and avoid going through the Live information pages: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bbdbd839-9597-4133-9b86-6d440fe9522b&displaylang=en
This is what you see if you're language is configured to be Norwegian:
This is the page that will download and run the unified installer for Windows Live Services. The unified installer is great, but that's not what I'm expecting when I send my friends a direct link to SharedView. Instead you need to copy the link directly to the .msi installation package and send that... which will probably scare some users when their presented with an installation package and can't read any information about it and make up their own minds...
When you have SharedView installation and configured with your Windows Live ID (TeamViewer allows you to use desktop sharing anonymously) you can start sharing applications, documents and desktop. But what happens if the people you're collaborating with has international characters in their names?
Håkon Rossebø, a co-worker of mine, looks like the following inside SharedView:
Come on... it's isn't that hard making this work!
Microsoft FolderShare
Microsoft FolderShare allows users to back up and synchronize files across multiple machines in your local network. If you keep a single machine online at any given moment, you can easily access all of your files from anywhere in the world.
But - this is another Microsoft product that had problems with internationalization. It was hit by a bug that automatically moved files in paths that contained international characters, into the trash!
Read more about the problem.
I'm currently on the search for a good online storage solution that allows me to use WebDAV-like protocols directly from Office tools so I can work on my presentations, documents, etc. Microsoft has a service called Windows Live SkyDrive which gives you a 1GB storage where you can upload and share files. I used this for some of my files, but it's not great having to use the web browser to manually upload the files. There is also an upload limit on 50MB which is just stupid.
I'm hoping to get access into Office Live Workspace soon, which looks like a very good solution to my problem. But until I get access there, maybe I should make an account on Wuala which looks great.