BANGALORE: Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd has launched its first offering developed specifically for the Indian market - Office Hindi. The product includes a Hindi language interface and supports nine Indian languages. The suite will allow users to create documents and communicate with others in their native language and also facilitate easy navigation, and use by providing menus and toolbars in Hindi.

Rajiv Kaul, Managing Director, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd said, "Our local language initiatives are aimed at helping Indian users realize the same benefits of IT as their peers the world over. Office Hindi combines a world class computing experience with the comfort and familiarity of the Hindi language - and we are confident of the value it will offer users in India."

The two editions of the product, Professional and Standard, will be available through Microsoft's regular sales channels. The company also announced the availability of online resources, training material and partner support to help customers adopt and integrate the offering into their infrastructure.

"Office Hindi will bring about a productivity revolution among those untouched by the power of computing due to language barriers. We expect this offering to be particularly popular with central and state government, public sector undertakings, the banking industry, educational institutes and the local developer community." Kaul added.

According to a media release, the development team comprised more than 400 professionals involved in various aspects including coding and testing. The product, like all others from Microsoft went through an extensive post development validation and testing process.

Renowned linguists, Prof. Suraj Bhan Singh, Prof. Jagannathan and partners like WebDunia and Modular have worked with Microsoft to provide linguistic validation. The product has also gone through a three year testing process with customer audiences, with their feedback incorporated at each stage.

The Professional version offers an alternate interface, providing users with the flexibility of easily deploying the Hindi or an English interface as required. It also offers multiple keyboard options, Transliteration, Inscript, Remington and Godrej, along with other variations.

Partners provide add-on applications or tools such as a Hindi Text to Speech converter, CBT (Computer Based Training) modules, additional fonts, special dictionaries, and special multilingual smart tags among others. Microsoft also announced the availability of "Office Step by Step" - an MS Press book in Hindi and Office Online (a resource center) in Hindi and a local Clip-art library.

CIOL Bureau