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The Company
Inféo is a French engineering and consulting firm,
part of the Suez group (former Lyonnaise des Eaux). It specializes
in engineering and software development related to the management
of water, environmental and public services infrastructures.
Inféo operates on all continents and is the leader
in the water and environment sectors. More than 60% of their
turnover is realized outside France.
The Project: X7
X7 is a client-server Customer Relationship Management
software aimed to companies supplying water and electricity.
It is currently in use in about 10 different sites out of
France, with 10 to 50 users each.
Development is done in French under Centura and required
up to 15 developers since 1997. It features about 200 screens,
100 messages and 20 reports. There are 2 major releases
of X7 each year on average.
Without WizTom
Before opting for WizTom, Inféo chose to implement
their own translation solution and process. This solution
was not very versatility and had limited technical capabilities.
Furthermore, the solution was based on duplication: there
was one executable per language, inducing strong management
and maintenance constraints.
With WizTom
Switching to using WizTom to localize X7 made management
and release of translated versions much easier as there
is only one executable file to maintain. Furthermore, thanks
to WizTom Controller, no code change was necessary to implement
translations.
WizTom Studio made it possible to centralize the localisation
process while providing a lot of flexibility: translations
can be reused from one project to another, adding a new
language comes down to simply translating the original strings,
translating new releases simply comes down to translating
new texts, etc.
Finally, it was possible to outsource the actual translation
to each site with import/export features and WizTom Translation
Pad, a simple WizTom Multilingual Database editor.
Conclusion
WizTom for Centura proved a robust and perfectly adapted
solution. Thanks to WizTom simple interface, the localization
process was speeded up and time-to-market of X7 cut down.
Furthermore, it greatly improves version management.
X7 has already been translated to several languages including
Chinese, Arabic — with mirror-effect for rigth-to-left
texts — and Amharic for Ethiopia. The fact that X7
is available in several languages gives Inféo a
strong competitive advantage against competitors.
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