TimeControl is in use in virtually every time-zone in the world. One of the questions we are often asked is how we will support the local display for users in different places who are all part of the same organization and same TimeControl instance. This term is commonly referred to as localization in the software industry.
TimeControl has several answers for that.
Languages
TimeControl ships with numerous language translations including French, English, Spanish etc. But, that’s often not enough. Even in a single language, many clients ask us if they can modify some of the terms that TimeControl uses. Perhaps the term “Task” is used instead of “Charge” or “Initiative” is the standard term in that organization for “Project. For this reason, TimeControl ships with the Language module included. A client can create numerous modified languages. They can copy from an existing language and then make their own variant. The same module allows a client to literally add a language we have never translated. Usually, only a tiny fraction of TimeControl’s terms have to be translated as this is usually most significant for the individual users who the client has defined to have the least amount of menu items to select from.
The labels on a page, the menu items, even the error messages can be modified.
Since this is a user-profile oriented aspect of TimeControl, this allows one language to be used for one group (in one country for example) and a different language to be used for a different group.
It’s a powerful aspect of TimeControl.
Dates, money and more
Many of the display options for TimeControl are either defined within the application (for example the currency symbol) or are derived from the browser’s “culture”. This makes TimeControl automatically show 30/10/2024 for our Canadian users and 10/30/2024 for our American users. Internal options for display options are either in the System Preferences (where they would appear for all users) or User Profiles (where they would appear only for those users with that User Profile.
Some options (such as select a language) are also changeable within each user’s MyAccount area.
Documentation
Aside from TimeControl-supplied documentation, what about an organization’s own process guide for using TimeControl. You can replace the documentation that is supplied with the product (or hide it) and instead, display your own. This can be used to show different language format guides (we supply both English and French user guides) or just display the how-to guide on the internal process along with where to direct your questions.
It’s always improving
We work on the Languages module and display options within almost every version of TimeControl and we often use this feature ourselves when we are helping an organization deploy the product. The language module is in both the on-premise and on-line versions of TimeControl.
You must be logged in to post a comment.