Featured Customer
Breaking Language Barriers:
VMware’s Global Partner Portal Transformation
Incorporated: 1998
Products: Hybrid Cloud and End User Computing. Software Defined Data Center.
Employees: 37,500 +
Countries: 100+
Situation
VMware’s Partner Central portal supported 50,000 companies and 300,000 users worldwide. However, 90% of partners weren’t using the portal due to language barriers and a lack of localized content. The system was missing the technical capabilities necessary for implementing localization, especially for Asian languages. Additionally, developers were not well-versed in internationalization (i18n) best practices and lacked the necessary knowledge to implement them effectively.
Challenges
- Dynamic and highly modular content.
- Many text strings were hard-coded.
- The system didn't support various date & time formats or character sets.
- It was a struggle to manage teams across different time zones and ensure project alignment.
Solution
i18n Solutions
Lingoport conducted an i18n assessment and provided best practice recommendations. To better manage locale settings, Globalyzer was incorporated, ensuring a careful match between language and country. Also, the development team was educated to spot issues in the code using Globalyzer.
Localization Solutions
Lingoport experts decided to use screenshots, Excel sheets with comments, and master data guidelines to simplify the translation process. The QA process involved collaboration between business and linguistic reviewers to track feedback as bugs in QA, even as reviews started before finalizing English sites. Lingoport managed unplanned content drops and tight schedules by adjusting the timeline, despite causing some steps to overlap.
Comprehensive Testing Solutions
Our experts ran extensive tests and trained teams, setting clear success criteria. After i18n development, Lingoport led initial i18n Testing, including pseudo-localization. They provided guides and meetings for IT/QA to establish ongoing i18n testing. The translation vendor did linguistic verification on staging servers. A small User Acceptance Testing (UAT) was conducted with selected business stakeholders. Finally, all stakeholders reviewed the localized content, ensuring the final site’s quality.
Developers Training
Developers, who initially underestimated the importance of i18n and L10n, received continuous training and education, highlighting the significance of these practices and sharing valuable lessons along the way.
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Results
In the first limited globalized release for the Chinese and Japanese markets, the localized content saw remarkable engagement. Within the first month of launch, the Japanese content became the 9th highest in total Partner Central pageviews, while the Chinese content ranked 17th. Previously, pageviews from these countries were less than 1% each.
This increase in traffic led to more transactions and deal registrations, demonstrating a clear return on investment (ROI) for the globalization efforts of Partner Central. This success underscores the need for further language support to continue driving global engagement.