Follow-up: Re: [ic] Europeanization of IC

[IC-Admin]

>>On 10 Feb 2001 12:18:31 +0100, Stefan Hornburg wrote:
> Marius Schaefer wrote:  

>> 
>> Hello, IC users !
>>
>> Although IC has support for localization and other stuff that suits
>> users allover the world, it is still a product with the main focus
>> on the American market (at least this is what I think).
>>
>> My company is greatly interested to fill in the gaps for users
>> in other countries, especially in Europe. As I'm visting Akopia with
>> an other IC developer in my company in the near future, I would
>> like to hear from you what do you miss from IC now in this respect.
>>
>> These points I will discuss there. Besides that CNS will work on
>> this stuff even if Akopia isn't interested in it now.
>>
>>
> It is great to hear that you plan do improve the european "part" of
> IC. I think a great improvement would be
>
> o payment-systems implementation which are available in europe (well,
> germany) like paybox.
> o tax-system prepared for the different countries.
> o interfaces to software like sap (well, we talked about this before)
> o manual in other language.... hmm.... better dont think about that.

Considering the recent answer of Mike Heins with regards to his
IC internationalization efforts and the difficulties to do such things
single-handedly,

Mike Heins wrote:


<PERSONAL-OPINION>

[snip]

> I tried very, very, hard to put good internationalization features in
> Interchange. Certainly much more than I received benefit from when I did
> consulting and produced most of them -- the great majority of my clients
> were US-based. I did it because I wanted Interchange to be international
> in scope. I believe it has proved to succeed at that to a pretty good
> degree. So in short, I paid LOTS of attention to it and I did not think
> of only the US.

> I cannot, however, be familiar with the customs of every country and
> the details of every business process. That is why I tried to make
> it flexible enough so that if you apply yourself you can do virtually
> anything you need to do with Interchange.

</PERSONAL-OPINION>

I like to ask a follow-up question to this subject matter:

Now that IC belongs to RedHat, there should be much more support in the
future for IC's internationalization efforts. For example I read on the
German RedHat site, that based on RedHat 6.1 there is a development
effort with SAP to produce a RedHat Enterprise Version 1.0 which is
optimized for usage with the SAP R/3 system.

http://www.redhat.de/products/linux/sap.php3

Doesn't it seem possible therefore to imagine that IC will have an
interface to SAP R/3 one day ? That IC  will have a German documentation
? Apparently there is a German Installation Manual for the RedHat distro
now available in Germany. 

Considering that there are Germans like Stefan Hornburg interested
and able to help etc., what is Mike Heins' best advice for Germans to
support RedHat's  internationalization efforts ? Shouldn't questions like
that be coordinated with RedHat's German office ? 

birgitt