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Globalize your On Demand Business

Overview

Your company has just made the strategic decision to expand into China, and you have been assigned the task to make sure that your business applications will work there. How do you find out whether it will work? This topic is designed to provide you with the information you need to determine what changes to the applications will be needed to ensure that they not only work, but work well, in China.

Note: One basic assumption is that your applications follow the guidelines for creating global applications as described elsewhere in this site, including using Unicode. If they do not, then additional work will be needed.

Items marked with a require Adobe� Reader�


	Guidelines to design global solutions


	Applying Globalization Architecture Imperatives to your business


	Globalization Solution Design Guide: Getting Started

Language handling

	Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese: they look the same to me!
	Chinese requires an elaborate mechanism to enter characters from the keyboard. This is known as an Input method editor (IME).
	Non-Unicode encoding schemes: new applications should be developed using Unicode. But they often have to work with data or older applications using traditional code pages.


	GB (Guojia Biaozhun) National Standard


	GB18030, the new standard for supporting Chinese characters


	BIG 5


	Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS)

Additional considerations

Text string manipulation, Text editing and Search


	Additional technical considerations

Locale specific information

Creating successful software for worldwide use requires attention to locale details ranging from date and time to numeric formatting.

Consult the various Chinese locales

Cultural Sensitivity

Country vs Regions: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao SHOULD NOT be referred to as "country". The term Regions is preferable

Color: the use of inappropriate colors in business applications can drive their success or failure. In China, the color Red is used to represent Celebration, Good Luck, Government, Joy, Fertility and Good Fortune. Consult the Chinese color theory - the symbolism of color in Traditional Chinese culture for the use of colors in China.