Hello Steve, you're right - language doesn't matter for any of the data stored in AD. Replication will work just fine. You might however face special challenges in correctly displaying the characters that are entered by your Chinese colleagues. This is where the language packs come in, as you already guessed.
Especially with Exchange, clients using different languages/codepages will contact GCs in AD to retrieve the GAL. As clients can potentially contact any GC (think of travelling Chinese users, who won't necessarily contact the Peking GC, but connect to your Australia GC instead), your GC should have all languages installed so that it can answer with the right codepages. Otherwise the Outlook client may receive unreadable characters from the GAL. Don't confuse this with the multi-language UI - You'll simply have to configure the languages via the Regional settings control panel. For international companies, it is a best practice to install all languages on all DCs, any of which could be a GC. For a distributed system like AD I preferr just to use all language packs instead of adding only a specific language, since you never know which codepage might be used in other regions of your company. /Guido -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Molkentin, Steve Sent: Mittwoch, 7. Juni 2006 17:50 To: [email protected] Subject: [ActiveDir] AD integration/replication with OS in different languages All, This may seem pretty straight forward, but I haven't been able to track down any definitive info anywhere, not even from Microsoft. We are looking at connecting a number of businesses within our region (Asia Pacific) to the same domain. No stress there - most of the DC's (where they exist) are all in some variant of English (all running Windows Server 2003). We have some businesses in China, however, that use the Chinese version of Windows Server 2003. What I am asking is do we need to do anything special (other than maybe install the chinese language packs on the english servers so we can read the characters they have entered as data for their accounts, etc) to have the directories integrate and not screw up replication or whatever? I do not believe so - it should all be the same, just a different character set responsible for some data entry so that will be copied but only readable with language packs installed. I just thought I would run it by the fonts of all knowledge here, as I am sure people have had similar issues that allow them to shed specific light on this dilemma. All help/pointers are greatly appreciated. Thanks! :) Steve Molkentin (themolk). Senior Network Engineer Information Services Team (Qld) ASSA ABLOY Asia Pacific (p) +61 (0)7 3373 5233 (m) +61 (0)401 709 405 http://www.assaabloyasiapacific.com List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
