RationalPlan Project Management Software v3.14 Internationalization And Outlook Integration

Stand By Soft has released RationalPlan 3.14, a strong project management software application developed to assist project managers in creating plans, tracking progress, allocating resources, managing budgets and analyzing workload, now going international and planning translation in several languages.

Important changes of this version:

* Added code for internationalization
* Outlook integration for .ics file (only VEvent) when sending email with assignments to resources
* Added deadline column and graphical representation
* Possibility to directly open Single Project files into Multi Project files
* Possibility to disable "check for updates"
* Increased execution speed
* Store/load settings for risks view
* Improved look and feel for Mac OS X
* Improved file locking mechanism
* Bug fix: Related to importing MS Project files
* Bug fix: When changing a calendar make a reschedule
* Bug fix: Compute the actual/remaining duration of phases correctly
* Other enhancements and minor bug fixes

RationalPlan started it's way to become an international product. Although for now only English language is supported soon enough there will be added other languages (Italian, French, German). This means that users from all around the world will be able to use the set of project management tools that RationalPlan offers in their own language.

Current version added Outlook integration for iCalendar .ics files when sending emails with assignments to resources. Now users can add Outlook to Apple iCal and Google Calendar list of clients that can open .ics files generated with RationalPlan. Still this feature is available only for VEVENT generated items and not for VTODO ones. This lack of functionality is the result of the fact that Outlook does not fully support the iCalendar protocol. More exactly Outlook does not support VTODO and VJOURNAL elements. This Outlook lack of compatibility with the iCalendar standard is a problem for many project management software packages available on the market but Microsoft seems to refuse to implement it even in Outlook 2007.

Task deadlines are easier to be managed starting with this version. Users can display them as columns in tasks table and view them also on Gantt chart. Hence delayed tasks are easier to detect and the project manager has more time available to solve them.


One other issue that was treated in this version is the file locking mechanism. RationalPlan uses a file lock system to avoid concurrent access conflicts from different users. But on certain network sharing protocols like Samba file locking mechanism is not supported. On these networks RationalPlan will still open files but without locking and is the users responsibility to manage concurrency.

The interface settings are now also kept for the "Risks" view. In addition to this the manager has the possibility to print the list of risks for a project.

The execution speed of the application was increased substantially on certain views like the "Resource Sheet" and "Task Sheet". More changes were made for a better integration of RationalPlan with the Mac OS X platform. Also some important bug fixes are related to the import of MS Project files.




SOURCE:
http://www.articlesbase.com/project-management-articles/rationalplan-project-management-software-v314-internationalization-and-outlook-integration-1138799.html

International Conference on Internationalization of Higher Education

Infosym 2010
(International Conference on Internationalization of Higher Education with special reference to Management Education)
The Indian higher education system has witnessed a significant expansion in the recent years, especially in terms of the number of institutions and the student
enrollment. According to the report on FICCI Higher Education Summit 2009, India has more than 400 universities and 20,000 colleges and out of these, about 63% are privately held, unaided institutions. Though these are positive trends, the Indian higher education system continues to show many shortcomings which create challenges in fulfilling future expectations, mainly arising due to globalization. In spite of having more higher education institutions than any other country in the world, very few Indian higher education institutions feature in the list of leading institutions in the world. At the same time, globalization has brought the world closer which has expanded the horizons of Indian students who are expecting a world class education from Indian higher education institutions.


In order to explore these dimensions, Symbiosis International (Deemed University) is organizing an International Conference on Internationalization of Higher Education with special reference to Management Education, at its world class campus, situated at Pune – 411 042, India on 14th & 15th October 2010.
The objectives of the conference are:
- To provide academicians, business leaders, students and researchers, a platform to present and discuss various aspects of Internationalization of Higher Education.

- To find out emerging trends in internationalization of higher educatworld class.
- To examine the special challenges in internationalizing Management Education, which has a strong local/national dimension,- unlike the pure sciences or even social sciences like Economics, that remain constant across boundaries.

Conference Tracks will be as follows:
DAY 1 : Thursday, 14th October 2010
Track 1: Building world class universities in Asia
Track 2: India’s Policies on Internationalization of Education
DAY 2 : Friday, 15th October 2010
Track 3: Design and delivery of an international curriculum
Track 4: Development of faculty for educating global citizens
Track 5: Internationalizing the student body - international student recruitment, support and exchange

Tags: horizons, 411, spite, challenges, boundaries, globalization, business leaders, shortcomings, social sciences, management education, education institutions, world class education, pune, indian students




ion and to apply them to make Indian higher education






SOURCE:
http://www.a1articles.com/article_1655336_22.html

International Marketing, Internationalization, Globalization

The international markets are of a growing importance for small and medium-sized companies (SME). International business cares for an increase in turnover, levelling of the turnover if the local economy is weak and offers more intensive knowledge of the competition and sales possibilities.

The marketing and sales consultancy Michael Richter, Daugendorf/Germany (situated in the real heart of East and West-Europe, near the Lake of Constanze) devotes himself especially to SMEs in order to accompany them in all steps of the internationalization - from Europe into foreign markets and vice versa.

Detailed information can be found at http://www.marketing-und-vertrieb-international.com/

Many pages - especially< of NEWS - offer solutions regarding modern foreign marketing, taking into consideration especially 'client benefit' and 'cost control'.

A further 'leg' of his support are marketing trainings and lectures, which he perform directly at the customers company and as per his specific needs. So far lectures were held in several universities of cooperative education and ICC's in Baden-Württemberg as well as at the 'Institute for marketing and trade ' of the University St. Gallen/Switzerland an industrial institution in Florianopolis/Brazil.


Based on a thorough theoretical background - economical studies at the VWA, Düsseldorf/Germany, permanent continued studies, as well as more than 35 years of marketing/sales practice - he develops suitable steps for every client to become more successful.

For his activity Mr. Richter is accredited with the European Union, RKW, Fraunhofer-Institutes, Steinbeis, as well as developing banks and a member of 'Christians in business / FGBMFI'.

Especially important is the possibility to 'Test your marketing' - see site - and thus to become more knowledgeable about the today's' needs.

Personal country experience as well as hints regarding marketing in foreign countries, which he knows himself, can be found at http://www.internationales-marketingkonzept.de/en/


Due to his living place at the very centre of Europe he reaches all European countries within soon.


Vita:
Michael Richter - International Marketing- and sales consultancy - has experience in marketing of investment and long-lasting consumer goods into all 5 continents for more tan 35 years (more than 50 countries) - from his activity as a clerks to being responsible as a marketing and sales director, especially for SMEs










SOURCE:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_128394_15.html

International Adoption: Tips for Adopting Foreign Children

International adoption involves two adoption agencies, two country's adoption law, two embassies, passports, visas . . . the pre-adoption list seems daunting. With proper preparation, however, there are ways to navigate all of the challenges. Once the child is home, there is a new set of challenges but those, too, can be successfully met by resourcefully seeking out those who have gone before.
Research Foreign Adoption Law

It is important to research the adoption laws of the country where the children will be adopted from. All countries have different requirements and expectations.

For example, some countries may require the adoptive family to earn a minimum annual salary. Another country may expect the adoptive parents to reside in the country for a minimum amount of time prior to the completion of the adoption. Adoption agencies are well-versed in the legal requirements of the countries they represent.

Find Reputable International Adoption Agencies

Ask around, seeking families who have successfully adopted children from a foreign country. Research the agencies recommended, and request references. All agencies will require fees to fund their programs, but if it seems the fees are excessive relative to the services provided, check other agencies.

A reputable foreign adoption agency will make arrangements for visiting and picking up the children, obtaining visas, travel arrangements and even translators throughout the trip.
Hire a Private Social Worker Experienced in International Adoption

The social worker will do a home-study evaluation and report the findings to the adoption agency. The home-study will address questions such as: Is there room in the home for additional children? Does the adoptive family have the necessary resources, including salary? Do the adoptive parents and/or siblings have experience with children, or criminal records? Essentially, the social worker’s job is to evaluate whether or not the adoptive home is suitable for and in the best interest of the children to be adopted.

The social worker will have follow up visits for up to several years, depending on the requirements of the country the children are being adopted from. These visits will involve meeting with the adopted children and the adoptive family, and making a report back to the initiating country, through the adoption agency.
Find a Mentor Who Has Adopted Foreign Children

A mentor is someone who has been through the foreign adoption process. His or her experience is invaluable to new adoptive families. The mentor can help select an adoption agency, help prepare the piles of paperwork, and in general be supportive and encouraging, both during the process and after the children are home.

If a mentor is not available, an adoption support group is extremely encouraged. This not only benefits the family prior to the adoption, but also the adopted children, who can associate with other children who have been relocated from their native lands.
Find an Interpreter Who Speaks the Adopted Child's Language

Along with support groups, seek out a local person who speaks the children’s native language, and arrange to meet with him or her on a regular basis, at least weekly. This will give the children a change to understand and be understood during the frightening period of transitioning to the new language.

Meeting with such a person will also give the adoptive family the opportunity to understand and be understood by their new children. Find out the questions the children have, and ask the interpreter to explain things to the children. This is essential for the children to have a smooth transition into their new culture, as well as fostering communication between the new family.

International adoption is very rewarding. Parents who have adopted foreign children often return to the same country for more children down the road. They may also adopt several children from a variety of foreign countries, giving new meaning to the phrase, “Blended Family!”





SOURCE:
http://international-adoption.suite101.com/article.cfm/international-adoption-tips-for-adopting-foreign-children

First Steps To Website Internationalization - Be Reachable To Everyone

Website Internationalization - Be Reachable To Everyone

Can everyone reach you by phone? Are you making the phone process easy so that everyone can actually call you?

This may sound like a strange question. But have you ever found yourself in a situation abroad, desperately trying to reach someone and just not being able to get through.

Cross cultural miscommunication happens often enough between people. Other factors come into play.

* Time differences complicate international communication.
* Different national holidays complicate international communication.
* Even different work weeks complicate international communication.
* And so do different telephone systems and habits throughout the world.



I have two examples of major frustration in not being able to establish contact by phone with the right person.


I was contacted by two French company executives desperate to place a large order with a well known American sportswear company. The French company had been trying for many weeks to speak to the appropriate person and simply could not get through the sophisticated phone system. They did speak English having lived for several years in North America. But they are French and used to doing business with people face to face. They like contact and wanted to speak to the right sales person in the American company.


These French executives just kept getting caught up in miscommunication errors in the fancy American telephone system. If the American company had known how much business was at stake and the different communication preferences in different cultures they make it easier for international clients to get through to the right person quickly.




Another true story happened a short while ago.

I looked for tickets online from a major airline. They had no direct sales office here in France and I was told I had to go online. I did as instructed and I soon found a convenient flight at a competitive rate. For some reason I had to speak to their reservations staff by phone.

This North American airline company had outsourced all phone calls to India. Communications were bad. There were several phone conversations within a 30 minute time frame. Each time I spoke to a different person and only to be given different rates that continued to increase until they were totally out of the price range in the original offer I had seen online 30 minutes before. Needless to say it will be years before I waste my time with that airline company again.



These are very aggravating situations and can leave long term customer dissatisfaction without you ever realizing it. If a foreign visitor is motivated to actually call your company it can represent a bigger effort on his part than one of your local visitors. You can recognize this extra effort by making it as easy as possible for him.

There is little you can do to prevent some of these incidences. You can learn to pick up the warning signs early enough and learn how to handle them better.

But there are a few things you can do to facilitate easy phone communication. They will also help your web site to make a good first impression.

Remember, toll free numbers are only accessible from within your own country. There are still many web sites that only think about placing this number prominently.

Does your have a company have an automated computer call center? Will your international clients be able to get through to right person quickly even if their question doesn't quite fit into your system?

Remember, if you hide your office telephone number somewhere in small print, your international users may not find it. And if they do they will assume your international clients are few and far between, or that you do not really want any foreign clients.

If you have your phone numbers clearly indicated, presented in a way thSOURCE:
at catches the eye, you will show the world you are happy to greet everyone no matter what their preferred method of contacting you is.




SOURCE:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_481042_3.html

Website Globalization Planning - Website Internationalization Makes it Easy

When a business sets up its first web site, it often cannot anticipate the full reach to its international markets.

Businesses are normally focused on their immediate business opportunities. Creating a web site opens your company to markets you are unable to imagine.

Over time you may get international enquiries and begin to see opportunities for development. A few more international sales and you may look into developing your visibility in certain foreign countries.

The world of international business begins to open up. What does this involve? What sort of issues will you have to deal with?


* Communication across cultures.

* Repositioning your products to sell well in different cultures.

* Confrontation with different cultures

* Adapting your business pace to fit into different practices.

* Slowing down to understand others.

* Developing empathy towards valued clients different from you

* Opening your mindset to take in all sorts of differences in all areas of business.


This may seem like an easy, pleasurable ride for those who are not involved in international business. It certainly can be one once you have acquired the personal skills that come with exposure to international business.

But the adjustment to handle international business can take a toll if you are busy with your local business as well. Things can take longer than you imagine. Personal issues can bubble up if you are too busy elsewhere.

There is something you can do with your online business to prepare yourself for international expansion. It is called website internationalization.

At first glance it can appear to be very simplistic. It often covers the same ground as good internet business
practices.

Internationalizing your website, when done methodically, systematically and conscientiously will have favorable repercussions on your international business development.

First of all, internationalizing your website simply means making your website friendlier to international online visitors. Your website will become more open to international sales. It will often perform better with your local customers as well.

The second good reason to adopt a website internationalization strategy is to prepare for your future online international development. The next step in online international development after website internationalization is website localization. This is creating a website targeted to a local foreign market.

Companies are often advised to localize into one country at a time. This is because unforeseen issues often come up in multicultural communication. It is far easier to learn by focusing on one process. This will give your company the time to make adjustments.

Having an internationalized website makes the transition to creating a localized website much easier. Your mindset will already have been turned towards your international audience. You will have paid more attention to your international communication and learned from it. Your company will be able to take any multicultural communication challenges in stride. You will be ready to truly enjoy the experience of international development.


Are you committed to speeding up your international sales cycles?



SOURCE:
http://www.articlesbase.com/international-business-articles/website-globalization-planning-website-internationalization-makes-it-easy-717219.html

Internationalization

Internationalization is the process of designing an application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Sometimes the term internationalization is abbreviated as i18n, because there are 18 letters between the first "i" and the last "n."

An internationalized program has the following characteristics:

* With the addition of localization data, the same executable can run worldwide.
* Textual elements, such as status messages and the GUI component labels, are not hardcoded in the program. Instead they are stored outside the source code and retrieved dynamically.
* Support for new languages does not require recompilation.
* Culturally-dependent data, such as dates and currencies, appear in formats that conform to the end user's region and language.
* It can be localized quickly.

Acknowledgment: Much of the design and implementation of the internationalization API is by IBM's Center for Java Technology-- Silicon Valley. of Sun Microsystems is grateful for their work.


General Information

* Internationalization Home Page
* Internationalization Overview
* Internationalization Trail of the Java Tutorial
* Internationalization Articles
* Frequently Asked Questions
* Supported Locales
* Supported Encodings


SOURCE:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/intl/index.html

International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War

Men and women from across the globe made their way to Spain in order to actively support the Spanish Republic and to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War, which was fought between 1936 and 1939.
International Brigades in Spain's Civil War

2500 volunteers went to Spain from Great Britain and Ireland, joining the International Brigades. Of those, 500 were killed in Spain [1].

Many of the International Brigadiers were motivated to fight by the idea that Spain was a front line in the war between democracy and dictatorship. They believed that it might be possible to stop the march of fascism by taking arms against it and fighting in Spain.

Spain in the Slide to World War Two

It is well-documented that General Franco’s Nationalist forces received assistance from Germany’s National Socialist Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Aspects of the Nazi Blitzkrieg tactics were tested in Spain’s civil war, allowing them to be honed and lessons learned ahead of their employment on the battlefields of Poland, France and various other countries in the Second World War (1939 – 1945).

Some historians argue that when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, less than 18 years after the end of the brutal Great War - which had decimated Europe’s armies and resulted in a generation afflicted by physical and mental injury - countries such as France and Great Britain were not ready to engage in armed conflict. Others believe that firm action at that point would have helped avoid the carnage of 1939 to 1945.
International Brigadiers Awarded Spanish Citizenship

Surviving British and Irish members of the International Brigades were awarded Spanish citizenship in a ceremony on 9 June 2009 at the Spanish Embassy in London, England. Seven of the veterans – Penny Feiwal, Jack Edwards, Paddy Cochrane, Sam Lesser, Joseph Kahn, Lou Kenton and Thomas Watters – attended the ceremony in which the passports were presented by the ambassador, Carles Casajuana. An eighth International Brigadier, Les Gibson, was unable to be present due to health-related reasons [2].

This came about due to the passage of the Law of Historic Memory (Ley de la Memoria Histórica) which was passed by the Cortes, the Spanish Parliament, in October 2007. This followed a 1996 decree which provided all International Brigadiers with honorary citizenship. At that time full citizenship could be claimed, but was dependent upon the Brigadiers renouncing their existing nationality.

George Orwell Not an International Brigadier

Interestingly, George Orwell, the author of the well-known book Homage To Catalonia, was not actually a member of the International Brigades but fought as a volunteer among an Independent Labour Party contingent, which served alongside the Spanish POUM militia.
International Brigade Memorial Trust

The International Brigade Memorial Trust is a British organisation which aims to “promote education, learning and knowledge concerning the historical legacy both of men and women who fought with the International Brigades against fascism is support of the legally elected government of Spain, and those who sustained their fight” as well as maintaining contacts with International Brigadiers and their relatives and friends.

The International Brigade Memorial Trust organises a number of events, exhibitions and educational projects plus a memorial meeting every July at the national Memorial to the International Brigades at Jubilee Gardens in London.
Select Bibliography of Spanish Civil War Sources

Beevor, Anthony The Battle For Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936 - 1939 (London 2006, Penguin)

Carr, Raymond Spanish Tragedy: Civil War in Perspective (London 1977, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Thomas, Hugh The Spanish Civil War (London 1961, Hamish Hamilton)
Sources of Facts and Figures

[1] Quoted in the International Brigade Memorial Trust Newsletter, Autumn 2009 edition.





SOURCE:
http://weuropeanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/international-brigades-in-the-spanish-civil-war

Internationalization Best Buy will swallow States United States Suning? - Best Buy, Gome - HC networ

As the world's largest operator in China, Best Buy, but less was known. Compared to GOME
Suning
The well-known in Chinese, Best Buy indeed largely been seen as not worth mentioning. However, the world's flat, closer international integration, China's international pace and consumption around the world again increasing internationalization, the internationalization of Best Buy will become the new electric power market by growing concern.

Basic level, more than the country of Best Buy U.S. Suning?

Although Best Buy has more than 1,000 stores in North America, but in China it is still a country dominated by the United States Suning, Best Buy at the regional space-occupying hundreds of superiority does not currently exist. But to become an international

Home Appliances
Retail predators, Best Buy in scalability and speed must have their way routine, even the Chinese market and the situation facing the test, but still have the opportunity to become a national headache for the U.S. Suning object. On the other hand, annual turnover of 30 billion U.S. dollars, Best Buy had a brilliant and no one can make the country one of the few U.S. rival Suning's speed can match the basic level, it seems superior GOME Suning.

Resource level, Best Buy, the United States more than China Su Ning?
Perhaps in the international market
Best Buy is excellent, but almost no foreign-funded enterprises entered China will not be acclimatized. This is not just because China is consuming the environment, but also all factors involved, but as a pillar of the domestic appliance industry, the status of the country above the United States and Suning advantage of no accidents. However, the endurance, the previous examples we had to worry about, although foreign investment will be agitated, and will encounter barriers, but to the loneliness, carding a 5 year relationship, even if only to set up a shop? Such attitudes and practices of China's biggest names are able to maintain sustainable? In addition, at the enterprise level, Best Buy's high-end line shield almost all the Chinese electrical brands, while GOME and Suning Electric has many years of cooperation between enterprises relationship. Although whether or not to consolidate. Meanwhile, Best Buy also to the low-end with the acquisition of Five Star at the core, so at this level, the Shuiyingshuishu, not necessarily.


The strategic level, Best Buy of the United States more than China Su Ning?

Thinking strategic planning is often the deciding long-term survival can not, Best Buy, though only after a 5-year time step, and now, many domestic enterprises more insight than the choice of the time as large-scale offensive time. For the winter, many people think is a good time to retire from the world, but the contrary, should be a good time to do the infrastructure. Various resources at the moment the conditions are relaxed, Best Buy more business than that. If as many people to speculation over the past 3-5 years before the winter, it can appear to be of Chinese power, what their situation? Moreover, the winter will not be so long, Best Buy will occupy faster pace, this way, States United States Suning has indeed some headaches.

Development level, Best Buy of the United States more than China Su Ning?
Huang Guangyu also aware of the high
Although the rise of consumer groups, the establishment of Eagle Electric, but invested entities, we remain concerned about whether it can focus on the development of loneliness and stability go? The hundreds of Best Buy at this point would not hesitate to seize. Now a shop 2 years Shanghai has sent a Best Buy store the world's top 50, rely on the only piece of the computer business, how should an increase in the copy? Once the market recovery, the establishment of Best Buy positions, consumer re-emergence, how?

True strength of the country the United States is not China's Suning, Best Buy one or two days to defend itself, to a certain extent, is also worthy of praise together. But we have reason to believe that consumer demand-oriented strategic positioning, product and consumer demand matching, self-marketing model building and whether improvements in-depth development of high-end channels and products, these will become the key point of winning. Best Buy, which currently are intensive, then the next? GOME Suning need to do more than the price war than marketing homework!



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SOURCE:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_1627872_45.html

International Exchange Programs

Many Americans think "exchange student" and envision a student from another country attending classes in the United States. The International Exchange Program also benefits American students by giving them the chance to study abroad.
Why Travel Abroad in College?

Dr. Kim Gillette, Assistant Director of International Programs at Minnesota State University Moorhead, said that many American students wish to travel abroad for a number of reasons. “Some students [enter the International Program] to gain cultural experience; others see it fitting into their future career plans. Some say they’ve ‘just always wanted to do it.’”

Gillette said that exchange programs vary depending on the country to which the student wishes to travel. Fees, academic requirements, and the length of the visit often depend on which school the student wishes to attend and the qualities of the corresponding program.

Preparation for International Exchange

Eurospring is a program at MSUM which allows students to study in Oxford, England for five weeks and tour Europe for three weeks during the spring semester.

MSUM graduate, Sarah Simon, experienced the Eurospring program in 2002. “I remember having to fill out lots of forms,” said Simon. “We had to meet with someone who had gone through the program and talk to them about what to expect. Then we had to take ‘pre-Eurospring’ courses, which was four days of classes about culture-shock, the geography of Europe and some other things we would have to deal with while we were overseas.”

Abray Dombeck, who graduated from North Dakota State University, also participated in Eurospring in 2002. “I loved the experience and decided to travel to Australia through the exchange program as well,” said Dombeck, who spent a semester studying at the University of the Sunshine Coast near Malulaba, Australia.

“Australia seemed more like America than most of the places I traveled to in Europe did. It wasn’t hard to get used to. People in Australia seemed nicer than Americans,” she said. “There were little things to get used to—there are no squirrels there, but I saw kangaroos all the time. And some people put beets on their burgers there. You don’t see that here.”
Culture-Shock

Simon also mentioned a number of cultural differences she noticed in her time overseas. “I was the most comfortable in England because it was the most like America. Sometimes I even felt embarrassed to be American. Usually we really stood out. People could tell we were from the US even before we opened our mouths. People I got to know well would tell me about their stereotypes of [Americans]. Some of them seemed accurate. Everyone in America has a car. American’s seem spoiled. I learned that you really can’t know what it means to be American from the inside—the rest of the world looks at us differently. ”

Differences in food, language and the other people’s attitudes are other aspects of traveling abroad Simon said were interesting. She said many of her cultural stereotypes were disconfirmed by traveling to nations such as France, Italy and the Czech Republic. “People didn’t always speak English. I’d always thought most people just learned it in school. And, in Italy especially, people seemed more open and liberal.”
Getting Involved in Exchange Programs

Information on how to get involved in the International Exchange Program, requirements for a number of specific Exchange Program options and a variety of other useful links for college students interested in international exchange can be found at MSUM’s International Programs website. This information, and that provided by other colleges and universities, can help students make informed choices and better know what to expect when considering studying abroad.





SOURCE:
http://workabroadtravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/international_exchange_programs

Internationalization - Subsidiary Office Or Foreign Branch?

Whether you want to make business with foreign individuals, or you think seriously to purchase foreign companies you will have to confront yourselves with the logics of corporate evaluation.

Nowadays the definition of a true and correct rating is the decisive, essential requirement to take entrepreneurial choices, even more in international contexts.

In the present article I'm going on from financial aspects to insurance ones while digressing into more specific topics of international law. I'm going to deal with these themes in a confident way and perhaps I will be lacking in not choosing a univocal content but in this way I think I will offer you interesting hints if you have decided to cross the national borderlines.

It is a matter of relying on professional people that can base their analysis on the most accurate methodologies. The rating has to show clearly the informative resources from which it takes its information, it has to allow transnational comparisons or through different principles of accounting.

The risk can be reduced thanks to reliable information but it can be held in a more traditional way too and rationalized through insurance tools.

Usually when we speak about internationalization and insurance processes we mean typical risks due to the country situation and credit. I want to focus your attention on some very common tricks to which the insurance world has reacted with Ad Hoc tools.

Let's start with the Director and Officer insurance that prevents managers and administrators from claims for compensation because of their conducts. In some countries the risk due to these events is very high and providing an entrepreneur with tools of this kind can be very useful in order to recruit professional people with high profile that will be able to work in a safer, comfortable way.

There are countries where conflicts caused by mobbing, downgrading, discriminatory dismissal are highly probable and this is why it is very useful to rely on ad hoc insurance tools.

Unfortunately it has become very useful the so called Crime Insurance that assures the company even against account fraud and embezzlement. Moreover there are advance tools that offer a coverage in case of purchaser's non-fulfilment during the purchase of a third foreign company

The concept to keep clearly in mind is that with the internationalisation the risk outline changes and the frame of insurance tools on which to rely on has accordingly to change as well.

I'm going to close my analysis with an in-depth examination of a couple of topics bound to the international corporate law.

Subsidiary office or foreign branch? The first one has the advantage of being more easily established at lower cost. The second one, with its more complex structure, guarantees the limitation of the risk capital to the branch's alone; meanwhile in case of subsidiary office it is always the head office to answer jointly and severally for any events. Besides notice that the structure of a branch allows the entry of local partners.

An other extremely interesting aspect of this topic is represented by the join-venture: this is a contract that disciplines the cooperation among companies and its aim is the realisation of a specific economic project.

Though it can be established among Italian firms too, it is normally used for international cooperation. Just think about the importance of local partners' knowledge while penetrating into a new market as some topical operations have recently showed in the automotive fields.

The join-venture can be both contractual and corporative: in the first case and for temporary relationships, there is just a contractual bound, while in the second case there is a deeper cooperation represented by the establishment of a dedicated company.

Apart from the aspects of the matter considered above and since the complexity of economic context, I think the best piece of advice is to rely on competent professional people because this is no longer the time to internationalise in an off-hand, rough way.





SOURCE:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Internationalization---Subsidiary-Office-Or-Foreign-Branch?&id=2206087

The International Baccalaureate

Mission

The International Baccalaureate is a not-for-profit educational organization that strives to develop “inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.”

The IB develops challenging international educational programs and rigorous assessments, and supports member schools who are committed to the International Baccaureate's mission.
Intercultural Competence

In addition to meeting academic prerequisites, students develop an understanding of other cultures, languages, and perspectives. They also learn a second language and develop the skills necessary for living and working internationally.

Such global competency is, according to IBO communications manager Jenan Al-Hadad, not just important but critical. She explains, "In the 21st century we are presented with conflict and challenges every day. The IB mission is about creating peace in the world through education. International mindedness is key to this and (involves) gaining the understanding that other people with their differences can also be right."
History of the IB

The International Baccalaureate had its beginning in the 1960s in Switzerland, where teachers at the International School of Geneva worked to develop a university preparatory curriculum and related examinations that would lead to an internationally-recognized diploma.

At that time, the curriculum was offered in only French and English, and only a handful of institutions participated in the trial. Today, it also includes Spanish as a language of instruction.
Growth and Size

The IB has grown into an organization which offers primary, middle years and diploma (pre-university) programs serving 638,000 students ages 3 to 19.

The IB works with 2,365 schools in 128 countries. Half of the schools which offer the IB Diploma are public government schools, and the IB stives to make its education available across all socio-economic levels.

"The IB today has a strong access policy which is all about getting our programs into the hands of as many children and schools that want it," says Al-Hadad. "Today, we see more governments supporting our programs so they are being taught in state schools as well as private schools."
The International Baccalaureate Diploma

The IB Diploma is known internationally as the highest diploma awarded by any high school in the world. It is awarded after successful completion of the grades 11 and 12 curriculums, and after a student passes six rigorous exams.

Accredited and prestigious universities around the world accept the IB diploma.






SOURCE:
http://curriculum-issues.suite101.com/article.cfm/international_baccalaureate

Internationalization of eCRM

The eCRM portfolio of customer-centric solutions integrates all the customer-facing functions to deliver a single view of the customer and a single solution for eBusiness, sales and service initiatives. These solutions are implemented globally across virtually every industry and ensure seamless interaction among web sites
, call centers, field sales and service teams. People develops, markets, and supports enterprise customer relationship management software Clarify eCRM .So the challenge is business people’s expansion plans included internationalizing its flagship product and launching it European, South American and Japanese market to increase their customer base as well as meet the annual revenue targets. The major business challenge was:

The complexity of the application and the impact of change on business operations mandated that no modifications to the existing code would be allowed.

Then our company provided a solution and worked closely with the people to understand the project, the business and technical challenges and formulate a strategy to support the business requirement with minimal effort. our company’s product engineering services team executed this assignment using it’s internationalization and localization engineering methodology. They performed the following steps:
• Code analysis and solution approach finalization
• Preparation of localization/internationalization framework

• All strings, application data, sample process, portal data and error messages were made localization ready by collating those in resource DLL or properties files
• Translation done for resource DLL and properties files and application was made intelligent to pick the language specific file depending on the locale value.
• Support for Unicode enabled UTF8 database was introduced by modifying code for database calls and modifying the table structures to hold the locale values.
• Creation of setup and install scripts to install resources based on locale
• L10N and I18N testing and issue resolution

Our company’s engineers architected the language specific part of the code so that it can be localized for any language without any changes to the code (Java files and JSP files).






SOURCE:
http://www.a1articles.com/article_999535_11.html

First Steps To Website Internationalization - Make Your International Visitors Feel Welcome

Internationalizing your web site is the first step in improving international online communication and developing your international business.

Good web site internationalization is also highly recommended as a first step if you are hoping to develop your online business internationally. International business development implies web site localization in each country you want to develop your business in. If your current web site is friendly to all of your visitors, including all of your international visitors, it will be much easier to develop localized web sites when your market demands take your there.

Perceived As Being Friendly To Everyone

Your first step is making your web site friendly to your foreign visitors. We know how to communicate with our next door neighbors and our colleagues. The further afield our audience is, the more we have to pay attention to how we communicate.


Don't pretend to be something you are not, and don't give up your unique identity. Simply remember your web site may have international visitors who might not feel as much at ease there as you do.

Foreigners will feel the cultural differences in your web site compared to what they are used to back home. Different cultures have different online practices. Sales have a different flavor. They will know they are some place far from home. And they will be making the necessary adjustments in interpreting your online messages.

You are inviting your international visitors to dialogue with you. They may feel hesitant to call or contact you because their language skills are not that great. They may feel embarrassed to call knowing it will take them 5 minutes to explain something that would take them 1 minute in their own language.


If you keep this in mind when writing your web site, the chances are that you will have a more "open" tone to your web site. A certain readiness to greet different people. It can be very subtle.

As a foreigner visiting other web sites, it is easy to identify web sites that seem totally hermetic to international contact and others you want to get to know straight away. The various degrees of "openness" or "friendliness" in between are more difficult to appreciate.

Don't Forget To Welcome Foreign Clients

Is there something you can do while internationalizing your web site?

Yes. Creating a relationship with international visitors can be as simple as having some text such as "We welcome all international clients" in the right place. For example, placing a welcome comment next to a phone number and email address. In the right place this will be a flashing neon sign to hesitant international prospects.

These few words of welcome can make the difference to a prospect either contacting you or moving on.

If you are highly motivated in increasing your international sales and try to convey your willingness to serve all of your international clients, this will come across throughout all of your communication. your foreign revenue will increase.


Get a free special report that gives you the 8 Steps To Develop Your International Business easily from where your business is now. This valuable report is yours when you sign up for the Get International Clients free weekly newsletter, with easy to implement tips and case studies to help you develop your international mindset and get you more international clients today. Get yours now at http://cindyking.biz/get-international-clients/





SOURCE:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_481050_3.html

Microsoft Dynamics GP Internationalization Notes

If you have Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly known as Microsoft Great Plains, Great Plains Dynamics/eEnteprise/Dynamics C/S+ or earlier predecessor - Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows and Macintosh) in your US, Canadian, UK, Australian, New Zealand or South African Headquarters and you are expanding internationally, we would like to review Great Plains internalization options. You should be aware, that Corporate ERP often requires so-called localization, which includes two aspects: local language support and country tax and government financial reporting compliance (plus often for large countries, such as Brazil, China, India, Russia it is often subject to strict government enforced industry legislation)

1. Accounting Application localization for Foreign country. As we already mentioned it is not only the local language support, it is also compliance to legislation. Microsoft Dynamics GP is localized in most of English speaking countries, plus in Spanish speaking Mexico, Central, South America and Caribbean islands. It is also available in French Canadian in Quebec. In South America it is not localized in Brazil (it is not localized in Continental Portugal, so you cannot expect Great Plains screen to be already translated into Portuguese). If you foreign subsidiary is located in small country (where tax compliance is not very complex and probably close to international GAAP) - you can try the route of translating restricted set of Dynamics GP screens (such as Sales Order Processing Transaction Entry, AP Payment, GL Entry) and modifying several reports to cover compliance to local legislation. However for large countries, such as Brazil, China, Russia, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine we do not recommend this simplification and rather have you choose different Corporate ERP, localized for your targeted country

2. Translating Microsoft Dynamics GP screens and reports technology. Assuming that your target language is supported in ASCII table (8 bits per character - most of Latin and Cyrillic based alphabets, also Arabic, Persian, Farsi, Dari and other Arabic alphabet based languages) - you can open Dynamics.dic dictionary in Microsoft Dexterity and translate string resources from English to your foreign subsidiary country language. This is only part of the story - you also have to install Dynamics GP on the SQL Server with local language and respective collation support (usually, if you install Microsoft Windows 2008 or 2003 Server for your local country, SQL installs itself with appropriate locals and your Dynamics GP installation will be tuned automatically). If you install SQL with local language and collation support and if you have your local user Windows workstations installed with locals for the country - Microsoft Dexterity Dynamics GP user interface should be able to accept and record local characters into MS SQL Server DB correct

3. Limited support for Chinese customers. Microsoft Dexterity doesn't support Unicode (16 bits per character - typically hieroglyph based languages: Chinese, Korean, Japanese), however you can review such product as NJ Star, which offers limited support for hieroglyphs in Dynamics GP and older versions of Great Plains Dynamics. You can also consider combining Chinese or other hieroglyphs with English based Dynamics GP records in Crystal Reports


4. International Corporate ERP alternatives to Dynamics GP. Microsoft Business Solutions promotes Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly known as Axapta) internationally, and it is supporting Unicode and most of the markets: China, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Europe. Normally Dynamics AX is considered as being a bit higher in price range, comparing to Dynamics GP Great Plains. If you are deploying GP as Corporate ERP in USA, there might be high chances that your largest operation is in US and internationally you have smaller facilities, and respectively the budget for international Accounting application is relatively modest. If this is your case, consider SAP Business One. SAP B1 is also available in most of the large Corporate ERP international markets, including China, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Russia - and its price is very competitive in lower and mid-market

5. Limited support for Great Plains Dynamics old versions in Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, and some other countries in continental Europe. Microsoft Business Solutions phased out support for continental Europe and to our information the last version available in German was Dynamics GP 9.0. Our company with offices in Germany and Eastern Europe traditionally supports Great Plains customers in Western, Eastern Europe and Russian Federation since 1995. Over the years we realized that the best support option is web session with phone or skype conference

6. Dynamics GP support and implementation in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Especially in Kabul, Afghanistan, Microsoft Dynamics GP has positive future for local state enterprises and international non-for-profit organizations, assuming that government reporting is close to international GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). We are happy to help local implementation consultants and CPA firms in Dynamics GP localization in Dari and training Dynamics GP users via remote support or if required with visit onsite from USA or Moscow offices

7. Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains Support in Oceania. We have successful old Great Plains Accounting version upgrade all the way to Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 for one of the customers in Palau. It is very convenient for our organization to expedite our Dynamics GP functional and technical consultants from our Manila, Philippines office to Pacific states, or from Los Angeles for large and more challenging projects

8. Microsoft Dynamics GP alternatives in Russian Federation. Our consultants speak Russian and we have local presence in Moscow, Russia. At this time, February 2010, we are inclined to recommend SAP Business One for your Russian subsidiary (regardless where it is located: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Volgograd, Siberia, Far East). We also have to admit strong competition from locally programmed and supported Corporate ERP systems, such as 1S Bukhgalteria - if you make that choice, we are happy to help you with 1C Accounting (1S Bukhgalteria in Russian) integration via FRx consolidated reporting to your Corporate ERP Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss and Cash Flow Statement in USA Headquarters




SOURCE:
http://www.a1articles.com/article_1371957_11.html

International Moving Checklist

The best strategy for a move abroad is to plan ahead. If time allows, begin coordinating an overseas move several months in advance. Allow ample time to gather documents and file visa and other applications, and then shift the focus to packing and shipping household and personal belongings.
Research Your New Country’s Regulations

Laws and regulations vary from country to country. Call the relevant embassy or consulate to learn of any restrictions and regulations for foreigners moving into the destination country. In particular, ask if there are:

* required visas and permits
* required vaccines for family members
* restrictions or taxes on shipped household items
* taxes involved in shipping your car
* required vaccines and quarantines for pets.

File Applications for Passports, Visas and Permits

Submit applications for passports, visas and permits as soon as possible. Check to see what will become invalid shortly after the move. For example, if a family member's passport will expire in the coming year, renew it early.

Gather Important Documents

It could take several weeks to get official copies of vital records and other documents. Start the process early. Consider bringing:

* Birth and Marriage Certificates
* Naturalization, Green Card, Proof of Citizenship, etc.
* Social Security Cards
* Vaccination, Medical and Dental Records
* Academic Records and Diplomas
* Employment Records
* Proof of Residency (utility bill, statement, etc.)
* Living Will and Testament

Prescription Drugs

If a family member receives ongoing treatment for a medical condition, request an extended supply of prescription medication. Ask for a copy of the medical file relating to the condition.
International Driving Permit

Renew a driver’s license if it will expire in the coming year, and obtain an international driving permit. Pick up extra forms for renewing the driving permit annually by mail.
Bank and Credit Card Accounts

Decide what accounts are essential to keep and notify the appropriate banks that the account holder will be overseas. Consider online international banking for easy transfer of funds between countries. Shred any statements, credit cards and paperwork that won't be needed.





SOURCE:
http://workabroadtravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/checklist_for_international_moving

HOME :: News-and-Society / International The Challenge to the Internationalization of Democracy By Rene Fonocho Article Word Count: 788 [View Summa

Democracy in developing countries in South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe has not been successful, not because these countries do not have competent authorities to govern them, but largely as a result of the way these countries came into existence.

Unlike western democracies which were formed by an amalgamation of states, most nations with young democracies were formed basically from the splitting of entire regions. The implication here is that a nation formed from a conglomeration of states will have to negotiate extensively and make compromises to ensure the survival of its unity. Synthesis is a constructive process, but most if not all undemocratic countries came into existence through the destructive process of divide and rule. To the dismay of many, the fragmentation into factional ideologies has evolved into a paradigm for governance in many of these very young democracies.

The governing structures that were left behind particularly after colonization had very little semblance of democracy. They were created basically to ensure and sustain a central government that had a favorable opinion on trade and which usually secured the former colonial master as the main beneficiary. Though trade relations are not necessarily retrogressive on development, these central governments were endowed with great powers and dominance giving room for the abuse of power that haunts them till date.

Democracy came to mean a bunch of elites taking the whole governmental system hostage and making sure one of their kin and kind gets to make the rules with absolute power. These central governments got so powerful that they every policy enacted became a recipe for corruption and subsequent military coups.

The problem has never been a lack of national good will or the unavailability of experts. Regrettably, their intellectuals and experts have been relegated from active participation in the democratic process as policy debates rarely feature in academic arenas. Industrious minds have been hijacked by the political system and are forced to comply with clumsy institutions.

Although cultural differences might have had some effect in stalling democracy in some of these countries, culture is so insignificant a factor to have caused such drastic failures witnessed around the world. The diversity in culture which is a natural democratic foundation is hardly used to promote democracy. Cultural differences are exploited and manipulated by a few individuals for selfish motives.

Every indication points to the fact the citizens of these developing democracies have the willingness to strive beyond their cultural limits, but this is made impossible by those who feel their positions will be threatened should the people begin to overlook their cultural boundaries. Democracy has come to mean a mechanism that makes you lose your position and gives your opponent the opportunity to triumph over you.

In addition, contrarily to encouraging democracy, the advent of multipartism instead helped enforced the divisions and differences left behind from colonial rule. The lack of adequate democratic institutions aggravated disunity. For selfish reasons and the pretense to avoid a complete collapse of law and order, most of these countries came to be governed under completely totalitarian regimes.

In these nations where the entire population seems to work for a few so called elites, remunerations to the masses are not seen as adequate payments acknowledging the hard work the people offer, but as charity and a reward for loyalty. The execution of public contracts paid for by taxes from the population is considered a gift and donated to regions exhibiting the most loyalty and submissiveness to the regimes.

The leaders in South America, Asia and Africa have used over and over and with deadly effect the colonial system of divide and rule. Just like the colonial system, the existing power structures are desperately made to consolidate a stay in power than make life better for the citizens.

Divide and rule has given rise to political animosity and tribal hatred. In the Middle East, South America Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa divide and rule was used to create submission, ensure the exploitation of natural resources and in some cases expel communism. Divide and rule is what these regions have learned for decades and a sudden change into a new era of democracy just can not come overnight.

The mere fact that in some of these countries different tribes live together, share similar social amenities and do not engage in endless conflicts is reason enough that the prospect of rapid advancement of democracy in not so democratic countries is not a delusional concept.

There is no greater hope than that these countries quickly adapt to the changing times. Though some of these nations often refer to colonial rule with disgust, they have recurrently made the colonial rule of divide and rule a model for governance.





SOURCE:
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Challenge-to-the-Internationalization-of-Democracy&id=4023373

International Moving - Shipping Cargo Overseas

Although moving abroad requires more advance planning and cost than a domestic move, the logistics of shipping household items from one country to another can be broken down into several simple steps. Following the guidelines below can help ensure a smooth household move.
Learn Regulations and Restrictions

Each destination country has its own rules and regulations regarding household moves and shipping automobiles. Taxes on importing automobiles, for example, can vary dramatically. Consult the consulate or embassy to learn:

* what documents are required
* if items brought into the country for personal use are tax-free
* maximum quantity of items to avoid commercial import taxes
* regulations on importing a car.

Decide What to Bring

Overseas moves can be simplified by bringing along enough furniture and household items to set up house upon arrival. This helps minimize shopping trips for basic necessities in a new country, and might save money as well. Also decide if shipping a car or buying one abroad is more practical or affordable.
In addition to basic household items, consider bringing:

* seasonal clothing
* kids’ toys
* books
* home décor items
* toiletries and dry shelf food items that are unavailable or more expensive overseas.

Decide Where to Buy Appliances

If the home and destination countries use different electrical sources – 220V compared to 110V, for example – consider such factors as warranty, ease of repair, and currency exchange rates when deciding whether to purchase major appliances abroad or from a domestic store which specializes in overseas appliances. If purchasing appliances from a domestic vendor, allow ample time for the goods to be delivered prior to moving day.
Check Compatibility of Electronics

Check household electronics to see if they are compatible in the destination country. Many televisions, computers, DVD players, cordless phones and more accept 110 to 220V input, and will require only a prong adapter to work in the new country. Televisions and DVD players will need to be multi-system.
Choose a Shipping Company

Call a number of companies before deciding whether to use a full service international moving (removal) company or a commercial shipping company. An international mover’s fees might include packing and loading of household items and furniture; a shipping company will leave all the work to the individual who is moving, although it might offer loading help for an additional fee.







SOURCE:
http://workabroadtravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/international_moving

Production of Sub–immersion—sub-internationalization Identity Through African American Studies

" race" is a misleading word since there is no" race "that is composed of biologically pure individuals because of the human migration and the interracial births. Also different ethnicities don `t have pure culture because people with different ethnicities shared and share cultural heritage. And although these two (race and ethnicity) are different since one is considered biological and the other is considered cultural but the two sometimes go hand in hand like when we face to" identity "and "racism" .
This belief of racism that one racial category is superior or inferior to another , is a stereotype. Stereotypes are n` t only negative but also positive and they are n `t only toward out-groups but also toward in-group. Also the feedbacks of one in-group or minorities to the others` stereotypes sometimes can cause to strengthen and aggravate stereotypes.
According to this approach, In this article I try to explain that although one of the major aim of establishing African American studies is to challenge racism and racial discrimination , but as its courses and syllabus show, they (scholars) have accepted stereotypes of out –group about themselves and they believe in "blackness" as a "race" because they have overly separated their culture from American culture and ignored acculturation between African American culture and American culture .
Thus this ignoring is a feedback to out-group stereotypes and it itself is an in-group stereotype which prevent African Americans to make a internationalization-commitment identity but a sub-immersion— sub-internationalization identity.

Black Racial Identity

"They are all like that", it is a common term when we tend to classify people who are n `t in our in -group. ( out-group homogeneity theory).
But why and how do we classify people? ( I will examine this issue in another essay)
And most important than this question is that who are "we" that tend to separate "we" from "others"?
As I will examine this issue in this essay in the case of African American studies:
First African Americans accept themselves as "we" , so they believe in black racial identity
Second although one of the aim of African American studies is to challenge racial discrimination and racism , but as courses show ,it represents the racial view of African Americans ( although scholars)
Third African American studies strengthen the racial view and blackness as a race.

As Cross( Bobo,2004) described , black racial identity development has five stages :

1- Preencounter : African American has absorbed many of the beliefs and values of dominant white culture – white is right , black is wrong
2- encounter: [ ]events forces the individual to acknowledge the impact of racism in one` s life.
3- Immersion: everything of value in life must be black or relevant to blackness, avoiding of symbols of whiteness
4- Internationalization: establishing meaningful relationship with white who acknowledge a positive sense of racial identity
5- Internationalization-Commitment: translating personal sense of blackness into a general sense of commitment

But African American studies seems to recede partly to third stage- immersion stage - that I claim it strengthens a new kind of identity which I call it " sub- immersion –sub- internationalization".

Concept Of Stereotype

According to stereotypes theory when we change the stereotypes, we do in one of three ways:

1- book keeping model: adjusting the stereotypes to adapt to the new information
2- conversion model: throwing away the old stereotype and start again
3- subtyping model: creating a new stereotype that is a sub- classification of the existing stereotype
but I `d like to add another way of changing the stereotypes regarding to given new kind of African American identity ; sub immersion- sub internationalization:
4- addition model : keeping old stereotype ,adding new information

We not only create stereotypes about others but about ourselves. As it is evident in the case of African American Studies , they keep the sense of blackness and add internationalization ,but not blackness nor internationalization change each other .

I examine my hypothesis in four universities and college: Boston University,Yale University ,University of Visconssin–Madison and Bates College.(although their courses are n `t the same but they are very similar)






SOURCE:
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/production-of-subimmersionsubinternationalization-identity-through-african-american-studies-213274.html

Internationalization of eCRM

The eCRM portfolio of customer-centric solutions integrates all the customer-facing functions to deliver a single view of the customer and a single solution for eBusiness, sales and service initiatives. These solutions are implemented globally across virtually every industry and ensure seamless interaction among web sites
, call centers, field sales and service teams. People develops, markets, and supports enterprise customer relationship management software Clarify eCRM .So the challenge is business people’s expansion plans included internationalizing its flagship product and launching it European, South American and Japanese market to increase their customer base as well as meet the annual revenue targets. The major business challenge was:

The complexity of the application and the impact of change on business operations mandated that no modifications to the existing code would be allowed.



Then our company provided a solution and worked closely with the people to understand the project, the business and technical challenges and formulate a strategy to support the business requirement with minimal effort. our company’s product engineering services team executed this assignment using it’s internationalization and localization engineering methodology. They performed the following steps:

• Code analysis and solution approach finalization

• Preparation of localization/internationalization framework

• All strings, application data, sample process, portal data and error messages were made localization ready by collating those in resource DLL or properties files

• Translation done for resource DLL and properties files and application was made intelligent to pick the language specific file depending on the locale value.

• Support for Unicode enabled UTF8 database was introduced by modifying code for database calls and modifying the table structures to hold the locale values.

• Creation of setup and install scripts to install resources based on locale

• L10N and I18N testing and issue resolution



Our company’s engineers architected the language specific part of the code so that it can be localized for any language without any changes to the code (Java files and JSP files).







SOURCE:
http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/internationalization-of-ecrm-1064855.html

How to Overcome Internationalization Risks

Successful foreign market expansion requires in-depth research and analysis to establish the pros and cons of this business adventure. It also requires general knowledge about market operations and specific knowledge about your target market. According to analysts, firms that have intensive international activities have reported a good performance in relative market share and return on investment.

Internationalization offers new possibilities to business companies. It enables to increase their volumes of products and services and, therefore their turnover. It also leads to improvements in the production system as well as in the communication channels. When facing internationalization, companies tend to leverage their assets to operate more efficiently.

Internationalization involves many issues such as adapting your business operation to different regulations and taxation systems. It also requires translation and localization of the different business operations such as documentation, project planning, training, support and maintenance, etc.

Steps to achieve successful business internationalization

Identify your goals and risks

Will you have a global goal or specific goals for different countries? This will depend on your approach (global or local) towards internationalization.

To control the risk factor, first of all, you need to identify them. A common economic risk is exchange rates fluctuations. There are also other risks related to political and social issues that might affect the economic exchange.

Detailed product evaluation

When analyzing the product, you should bear in mind all the aspects including product functionality, design, market price and name. Some products are unsuitable for specific markets due to their functionality or to specific local regulations.

Learn the regulatory frameworks

There are some products or services that are banned from specific countries or can be traded under strict regulations. Online gambling, for instances, has been banned or severely restricted in USA and therefore this country should not be a target for this type of services. You should also be aware of the Free Trade Agreements that involve your country.

Design a business strategy for each specific market

Each specific market will require a different approach and therefore you have to implement a strategy that will suit the target locale, starting from choosing a mode of entry. The operational strategy should depend on the market requirements, the resources available and the performances objectives. The appropriate business plan will require effective management information systems in order to expedite transactions and improve the quality of the services.

Take into consideration political and economic situation

Political, economic and social issues can stimulate or hinder business internationalization. These factors could affect buying behavior, exchange rates, products prices, taxes, etc. Political and economic uncertainties may certainly affect your business operations and for that reason a comprehensive research of the prospect markets should be carried out before starting any attempt of internationalization.

Be aware of the language barrier

The language barrier could easily hinder internationalization projects. It is highly advisable get the support of a translation company that specializes whether in financial translations or in legal translations. Get support from native speakers analysts that are culturally up-to-date. Their knowledge will help you to understand better the new environment and how to the advantages of the specific characteristics of the target market.

Information is the keystone to develop suitable business internationalization projects. Business internationalization is a complex process that may bring a lot of benefits alongside with risks. An exhaustive analysis of the target locale and your business prospects will highlight the factors that affect the whole process and will lay the foundations for a successful business operation.





SOURCE:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Overcome-Internationalization-Risks&id=4478883

Top 10 Tips for Internationalization

There are two kinds of software internationalization you can refer to - built in to the product from the start, and performed on existing code. The kind of internationalization (i18n) this article invokes isn’t the sort that’s designed into a product right from conception. That is less common, though the pull of global markets is changing that tide. Few application
development teams have historically had the opportunity to incorporate world market foresight. They had to produce a product to market for the most immediate business requirements. So then most internationalization happens on existing code because someone sells something, a global company buys another company, or a strategic initiative has taken form. Suddenly there is a new requirement for software to work in any number of new languages and locales. Business requirements drive technical schedules first, rather than involving a creative path of inventing new cool functionality or products from the ground up.

I’m tempted to just write Don’t Panic, carry a towel and avoid Vogon poetry - and while you’re at it, Unicode’s pretty good stuff. I’m being flippant because internationalization efforts tend to each have their own unique challenges when you get into the details. I’ll instead provide this article as a series of i18n process tips that apply across the board. In general Internationalization (i18n) is messy, full of exceptions, and generally not considered optimally from a development perspective. Maybe that should be tip one.

Tip One: Internationalization is ugly. Expect that from the start. You are reverse engineering basic logic of how your software inputs, stores, retrieves, transforms and displays data. You are adding user interaction functionality that your product wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s rarely just about embedded strings. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. It’s a lot of work. In some cases you can run into weird stuff from areas such as compilers, middleware, database connectivity, and even low level operating system issues.

Tip Two: Get the big picture questions handled quickly. That is, what are the high level requirements, how much time do you have, how much time do you need and how much budget can you get? Be prepared to ask for what you need in the CFO’s or CEO’s language.

Tip Three: Remember what’s driving this - Revenue. Internationalizing a complex application is a big new requirement. Don’t underestimate. Being late will cause delays in revenue, stall marketing and sales investments and make you very unpopular. Do it poorly and rushed, and your product will be shabby for the very new customers you seek.

Tip Four: Do some good research or get help identifying requirements. For instance, consider language only as one aspect of a locale. English is a language. Yet England is a different locale, with different expected behavior than the States. Consider numerical formats, dates, times, postal addresses, phone numbers, paper size, currencies and more. Then add the specifics that your application may need, like any possible customizations of workflow, locale selection and more. Consider what the optimal character encoding implementation strategy is for your computer platforms, application tiers, programming languages, database requirements, etc.




SOURCE:

http://www.articlesbase.com/international-business-articles/top-10-tips-for-internationalization-349565.html

Unicode Primer for the Uninitiated: Internationalization

Among our friends and clients at Lingoport.com, we regularly see ranges of confusion, to complete lack of awareness of what Unicode is. So for the less- or under-informed, perhaps this article will help. The advent of Unicode is a key underpinning for global software applications and websites so that they can support worldwide language scripts. So it’s a very important standard to be aware of, whether you’re in localization, an engineer or a business manager.

Unicode Growth

Firstly, Unicode is a character set standard used for displaying and processing language data in computer applications. The Unicode character set is the entire world’s set of characters, including letters, numbers, currencies, symbols and the like, supporting a number of character encodings to make that all happen. Before your eyes glaze over, let me explain what character encoding means. You have to remember that for a computer, all information is represented in zeros and ones (i.e. binary values). So if you think of the letter A in the ASCII standard of zeros and ones it would look like this: 1000001. That is, a 1 then five zeros and a 1 to make a total of 7 bits. This binary representation for A is called A’s code point, and this mapping of zeros and ones to characters is called the character encoding. In the early days of computing, unless you did something very special, ASCII (7 bits per character) was how your data got managed. The problem is that ASCII doesn’t leave you enough zeros and ones to represent extended characters, like accents and characters specific to non-English alphabets, such as you find in European languages. You certainly can’t support the complex characters that make up Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages. These languages require 8-bit (single-byte) or 16-bit (double-byte) character encodings. One important note on all of these single- and double-byte encodings is that they are a superset of 7-bit ASCII encoding, which means that English code points will always be the same regardless the encoding.

The Bad Old Days

In the early computing days, specific character single- and double-byte encodings were developed to support various languages. That was very bad, as it meant that software developers needed to build a version of their application for every language they wanted to support that used a different encoding. You’d have the Japanese version, the Western European language version, the English-only version and so on. You’d end up with a hoard of individual software code bases, each needing their own testing, updating and ongoing maintenance and support, which is very expensive, and pretty near impossible for businesses to realistically support without serious digressions among the various language versions over time. You don’t see this problem very often for newly developed applications, but there are plenty of holdovers. We see it typically when a new client has turned over their source code to a particular country partner or marketing agent which was responsible for adapting the code to multiple languages. The worst case I saw was in 2004 when a particular client, who I will leave unmentioned, had a legacy product with 18 separate language versions and had no real idea any longer the level of functionality that varied from language to language. That’s no way to grow a corporate empire!

ISO Latin

A single-byte character set that we often see in applications is ISO Latin 1, which is represented in various encoding standards such as ISO-8859-1 for UNIX, Windows-1252 for Windows and MacRoman on guess what platform. This character set supports characters used in Western European languages such as French, Spanish, German, and U.K. English. Since each character requires only a single byte, this character set provides support for multiple languages, while avoiding the work required to support either Unicode or a double-byte encoding. Trouble is that still leaves out much of the world. For example, to support Eastern European languages you need to use a different character set, often referred to as Latin 2, which provides the characters that are uniquely needed for these languages. There are also separate character sets for Baltic languages, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and on and on. When having to internationalize software for the first time, sometimes companies will start with just supporting ISO Latin 1 if it meets their immediate marketing requirements and deal with the more extensive work of supporting other languages later. The reason is that it’s likely these software applications will need major reworking of the encoding support in their database and functions, methods and classes within their source code to go beyond ISO Latin support, which means more time and more money – often cascading into later releases and foregone revenues. However, if the software company has truly global ambitions, they will need to take that plunge and provide Unicode support. I’ll argue that if companies are supporting global customers, and even not doing a bit of translation/localization for the interface, they still need to support Unicode so they can provide processing of their customer’s global data.






SOURCE:
http://www.articlesbase.com/software-articles/unicode-primer-for-the-uninitiated-internationalization-article-415361.html

Internationalization through Acquisition : A Case Study of Getinge AB

Business has seen tremendous growth through internationalization over the last several decades. As one of the strategies for companies to internationalize, acquisition has since then been a well-studied subject. Various steps have to be gone through in order to acquire a company. Afterwards, companies need to take different measures to ensure the success of the acquisition. Culture is usually considered as the most important aspect which determines post-acquisition success. The purpose of this master dissertation is to thus investigate company’s internationalization via acquisition regarding the pre-acquisition decision-making and post-acquisition cultural management. The theoretical framework consists of literature of pre-acquisition decision-making process and post-acquisition culture management. These theories are put together in an analytical model where possible connections are intended to achieve. It will also be used as a foundation in gathering and analyzing the empirical data. In a qualitative approach, the empirical data was gathered through semi-structured interview with the president of Getinge International Group. These findings were also complemented with secondary data such as corporate websites, documents and various scientific articles. The findings of the study show that planning, evaluating, negotiating, making the deal and integration are the five essential steps concerning the process of internationalization through acquisition. The authors find out that identifying of acquisition candidates is not necessarily a part of pre-acquisition as the theory may suggest. The distinction between bolt-on and platform acquisition is of critical importance to determine the different criteria and procedure certain company is going to take. This proves to be much more practical, where theoretical support has not been fully established. Both national and corporate cultures are of crucial importance for the success of company’s post-acquisition culture management. According to the finding of this research, two factors seem to link pre and post acquisition process; one is the planning of how future organization is managed; the other is the appropriate choice of managing director.

SOURCE:http://www.essays.se/essay/e62b6a6727/

Implementing localization/internationalization(i18n) in Flex

I spent yesterday and today morning understanding the intricacies of flex localization. There is considerable amount of Adobe documentation around the syntax and procedure for implementing localization. Unfortunately this documentation is not adequate for a first time localization implementer.

Just for reference, I continue to do my development using Flex Builder in Windows environment.
First set up the Flex Builder to handle internationalization(i18n). In case you have tried implementing i18n for say France using the Adobe documentation and tried running your sample, you would encounter the following error message:

view source
print?
1 "unable to open ‘C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.1.0\frameworks\locale\fr_FR’"

This would have been a dead-end for me but for the useful blog I found surfing the net.

Open a command prompt. Go to bin folder located within C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.1.0\bin. And run the following command on the prompt.

copylocale en_US fr_FR

This command will create fr_FR folder within C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.1.0\frameworks\locale\. Four files namely: airframework_rb.swc, automation_rb.swc,framework_rb.swc and rpc_rb.swc are created.
Now let’s move on implementing the i18n functionality in Flex Builder.
Create a new flex project. Within the project’s src folder create a sub-folder named locale. Within locale create two folders namely en_US and fr_FR. These sub-folders will have the property file named form.properties

Contents of form.properties file under the en_US sub-folder
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print?
1 firstname=First Name

Contents of form.properties file under the fr_FR sub-folder
view source
print?
1 firstname=Prénom
Here’s the sample Flex Application MXML to test the i18n functionality. The MXML is self-explanatory.
view source
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01
02
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04 [ResourceBundle("form")]
05
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18 } else if ("2" == selectedLocale) {
19 resourceManager.localeChain = ["en_US"];
20 } else if ("3" == selectedLocale) {
21 resourceManager.localeChain = ["fr_FR"];
22 }
23 }
24 ]]>
25
26
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28 dataProvider="{localeDD}" labelField="@value" change="setLocale()"/>
29
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32 color="#FFFFFF" fontWeight="bold" fontSize="13"/>
33
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Before running the Flex application, open the Properties of the flex project. Select Flex Compiler item within the Properties window. It will provide a text input field titled “Additional Compiler Arguments”. Key in the following arguments:

-locale=en_US,fr_FR -source-path+=/locale/{locale}

Run the application, change the locale and observe the changes in the label display value.


SOURCE:http://technicalmumbojumbo.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/implementing-localizationinternationalizationi18n-in-flex/

Guide on How to Write University Essays, Courseworks, Assignments and Dissertations Internationalization

The process of Internationalization can be described as “the process of increasing involvement in international operations”. (Welch and Luostarinen, 1988). The process essentially involves the adaption of firm operations like strategy, structure, resources etc. to perfectly fit the international environments. Furthermore, the degree of internationalization can be measured as foreign sales relative to total sales. (Welch and Luostarinen, 1988).



The goal of the Internationalization process is to have a pronounced global presence in an attempt to keep abreast with their competitors, to generate improved profitability and be known as a multinational; a sure sign of success and credibility. The process typically entails generalizing a product to counterbalance and efficiently expedite the subsequent localization process. The result is an improved quality product as well as reduced localization costs and time to market. The internationalization process may involve the following tasks:



* Reduce surplus or repetitive text.
* Modify and/or settle on a final text before the localization and translation process.
* Application of standard language/nomenclature.
* Creation of a glossary containing original, technical or perhaps unclear terms.
* Implementation of a coherent writing style.
* Adherence to grammar rules
* Flexible layouts that fit right-to-left or top-to-bottom scripts
* Application of programming tools that support foreign language character sets. (RFIDwizards, 2007).



Several theories have been postulated over the years to maintain and enhance the essence of the process of internationalization. According to the theories of the stage model; the process of internationalization may be successful if a specific prescribed path is followed. Strategic decisions that the firms have to face play a vital role in validating the above assumption.



The internationalization process is described as a gradual development taking place in distinct stages (Melin 1992). The process can be clearly identified under two major schools: (1) the models initially developed by Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul (1975) and Johanson and Vahlne (1977), referred to as the Uppsala models (U-models); and (2) the Innovation-Related Internationalization Models (I-models) conceptualized by Cavusgil (1980). Both the I-model as well as the U-model emphasizes on firm’s involvement in foreign market segments. The U-model describes the process as "a gradual acquisition, integration and use of knowledge about foreign markets and operations and a successively increasing commitment to foreign markets” (Allbusiness, 2000). The strategic choices under the U-model are influenced by many factors which include certain aspects which either help in or suppress exports, information requirements and collecting informational data, foreign market selection and entry (including the effects of cultural distance), expansion, and marketing strategies (Leonidou and Katsikeas 1996).



Due to the various factors involved, it is rather difficult to accurately assess this model. In Cavusgil's I-model, the involvement of exports is operationalized by the ratio of sales/export, which in turn indicates a firm’s reliance on foreign markets.

In the process of internationalization; market knowledge is gradually increased and the company gets a clear picture over time, reducing the involved uncertainties. Different companies gather a different approach but with a similar objective in mind. If the process of internationalization is relatively slow, it is primarily because companies either want to avoid risks or are unable to gather relevant or enough knowledge and information.


SOURCE:http://university-essays.tripod.com/internationalization_internationalisation.html