Free "SharePoint Site Template" Language Converter
Hi all,
I guess most of you heard about the "Fantastic 40" - 40 Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The basic idea behind those templates is to provide further out-of-the-box custom solution for specific scenarios such as Knowledge Base, Call Center etc. You can also use them a starting point for your own custom scenario (most of the time using regular editing tools such as Share Point Designer 2007).
The "Fantastic 40" was actually divided into two groups, site admin templates and server admin templates that were released separately. Unfortunately, only the admin templates are available for non-English languages (ten to be exact: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Chinese simplified and Chinese traditional) while the site templates are available in only in English.
Sucks isn't it? If we're talking about scenarios - think about this one (happened in real life to... hmm a really "close friend of mine"): You browse the Microsoft website and suddenly you see this beautiful template that happens to fit like a glove to a really nasty task you were assigned to just yesterday. You get all excited and tell ur boss it'll take you a day or two to implement (while laughing hard inside and thinking that it sure looks like someone is going home early today). Finally, when you sit on your desk and clicks on the "download" button you see the small printed words. Those evil phrase that will make you work twice as hard and effectively kill you early departure - "English Only"...
Well NO MORE!!! This is a new, brave and global Hi-Tech world and we're supposed to speak only one unified language (ASP.Net 2.0 in MOSS's case) so WTF? The good people in KWizCom decided to make a stand and released a mega-cool and FREE utility called "STP Language Converter" (available here). This little baby can convert a Site Template (.stp) file that was created in one language to a site template in another language without any hassle. Since it's very easy to create Stp files (supported in the simple MOSS UI) - it means you can totally re-consider the "English-Only Fantastic 20" and any Site Template you'll ever see in the future, as something you can translate to ur own language and use without a problem.
French goes English, Spanish goes Italian and even Arabic goes Hebrew. Peace had to start somewhere, I guess it chose MOSS...
Bye,
Adir Ron.