In our company we have two primary languages that are used, Japanese and English. There are two seperate mail organizations and seperate Active Directory Forests for each language. Right now we do an occasional export of user information from each Domain and import into the other as exchange contacts. The process is very labor intensive as the user information has to be translated from one language to the other before importing. For example, Kanji needs to be traslated to English before importing into system based on English language. My question has two parts: 1) Is this the only way to share contacts between organizations with different languages? It seems like with all the international companies these days there has to be a better way... 2) Is it possible to store user information in two different languages in Active Directory? The goal would be to have the user object contain his/her name,title,department,etc in English and Kanji both. The GAL would then need to be poplutaed with that same information. Can this be done through custom attributes perhaps?

I know of no automatic way to do this. Most international companies I've worked with standardize on one language for the directory. One thing you could do is to use custom attributes for data in the "other" language and then use a product like Forefront Identity Manager to synchronize the directories. For example, in the English directory, use custom attribute 15 for the Kanji version of the display name, and configure the directory synchronization to put that value in the Japanese directory's display name, and vice-versa. When you populate accounts, you will then supply the information for both directories at the same time. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "VOND" wrote in message news:9f8677a6-a352-40d4-99b0-dda45b5b2126... In our company we have two primary languages that are used, Japanese and English. There are two seperate mail organizations and seperate Active Directory Forests for each language. Right now we do an occasional export of user information from each Domain and import into the other as exchange contacts. The process is very labor intensive as the user information has to be translated from one language to the other before importing. For example, Kanji needs to be traslated to English before importing into system based on English language. My question has two parts: 1) Is this the only way to share contacts between organizations with different languages? It seems like with all the international companies these days there has to be a better way... 2) Is it possible to store user information in two different languages in Active Directory? The goal would be to have the user object contain his/her name,title,department,etc in English and Kanji both. The GAL would then need to be poplutaed with that same information. Can this be done through custom attributes perhaps? Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Hi, In Exchange 2000 Server, the language in which the phrases "Global Address List" and "Outlook Address Book" are displayed is determined by the version of Outlook that you are using. The language that you select when you install Windows 2000 as the operating system for the first Exchange 2000 Server computer in your organization determines which language that the individual address lists are displayed in. For example, if you install the English-language version of Exchange 2000 Server, and you have the French (Canada) version of Outlook installed, "Global Address List" and "Outlook Address Book" are displayed in French, and all of the lists are displayed in English. Besides, we have to consider the following issue which would happen: 1. English client will not see the name correctly in GAL. Just vertical stoke as the client can't display the Unicode character; 2. OAB server will have problem generating OAB; 3. Sorting will be a problem; 4. English client will not be able to locate Chinese users if they only have Chinese name; 5. The same problem will exist for mixing any two or more client with different languages; As a workaround, you may try the following steps, but that could not be auto, we have to manually change some value on user properties in GAL. 1. Put English name first, then the foreign language name after it; 2. English client will see the English version of the name and other part willnot be displayed correctly; 3. Admin has to be careful not to change the display name portion that he can'tread; 4. Admin may have to install all code pages/fonts and select different fonts to read different languages; 5. Export of directory must use Unicode; 6. Import of directory may distroy foreign language disply name; 7. Only have foreign language in display name, but not in any email address; More related information to share with you: Contents of the Address Book Are Displayed in Multiple Languages http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325525/en-us Regards, Xiu