1 + 1 = 3

posted 2007-06-08 13:58:23
by Bill Rabkin

At Idiom Technologies, we recently initiated a project to globalize our Website. Firmly believing in "eating our own dog food," we selected WorldServer On-Demand as our globalization solution. Our WorldServer On-Demand team enrolled Idiom Marketing as a new customer and created a new WorldServer On-Demand system for our use. I was appointed the customer's WorldServer Administrator.

A few hours after we requested the system, I received an e-Mail giving me my logon credentials and the URL of our new WorldServer On-Demand system. I logged in and created user accounts for my our Idiom Web team colleagues.

For translation services, we selected Platinum members of the Idiom LSP Partner Program. It was time to configure our new WorldServer On-Demand system -- to create TMs, TDs, workflows (including some custom Automatic Actions), and user accounts for our LSPs' translators, reviewers, and project managers. While I certainly could have defined all of those objects in our WorldServer On-Demand system, the synergies that exist when both LSP and client use WorldServer soon became obvious.

I created a single user account for the WorldServer Administrator at one of our selected LSPs, and invited her to log in from her office in Dublin, Ireland. She did...and soon she had defined a new workgroup, created user accounts for each member of her team, uploaded custom workflow automatic actions, built a workflow to implement the translation process that this LSP prefers, created folders for transfer of work between themselves and Idiom. Very quickly, we were ready to create a small test project using this workflow, to "beta test" the process from end to end before we submitted the entire Website for translation. Good thing we did that, as we had forgotten to add the Idiom team users to the LSP's workgroup so that we could be assigned a Human Step within the workflow. Quickly remedied, and the test project sailed through to completion.

"How wonderful it is," I thought to myself, "to share the administrative workload with our supplier." Since being the WorldServer Administrator is only one of my many responsibilties, I welcome any help that's available.

And it's going to get better yet! My friends in Idiom Engineering recently showed me a prototype of an integration between two independent WorldServer systems -- the enterprise's WorldServer and the LSP's WorldServer. Workflows in both systems join each other to provide a seamless end-to-end process in which assignments and data flow back and forth effortlessly. Stay tuned!

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