Azure Cloud on Ulitzer

This post was suggested and contributed to by Emad Steitieh, with contributions by Daniel Kucinski.

Internationalizing software has been overlooked by companies in years past. Many available software applications lacked the ability to work with different languages or locale variations such as calendars, currency and numbering conventions. Although North America is a rich market and many companies thrive to take market share, the international market brings new opportunities for businesses - this is why more and more companies are working hard to satisfy all tastes both domestically and internationally.

With the recent end of support for Windows Server 2003, the focus on application migration and cloud onboarding has increased as enterprises move their applications onto more modern [supported] platforms in datacenters and the Cloud.  Windows Server 2003 has been deployed worldwide for the last 12 years and the applications running on the old Operating Systems (OS) are written in many different languages.

Windows Server 2003 and other OSs have matured to provide facilities for software developers to enable multi-language features in their software. OSs such as Microsoft Windows operates in two modes: ANSI and Unicode. Every system API function that accepts strings has these two single byte and double byte versions. Thus the Windows environment enables the user to work with keyboards in different languages with different user interface elements such as dialogs, messages, notifications, and fonts that are not just in English. At AppZero, we have also decided to meet the persistent demand from our international customers and enable our software to work with non-English Windows environments. After the release of AppZero 6.1 earlier this year, our customers all over the world can now enjoy the convenience of migrating their applications from non-English sources to non-English destination machines.  This includes several key components such as:

1. Creation of VAAs (containers)under non-ANSI names and paths
2. Finding and tethering of source applications that have non-ANSI names, file paths, file content, registry keys...etc.
3. Seeing logs and configuration files that contain non-ANSI characters

For example, migrations with AppZero are agnostic to OS specific regional settings, encodings and/or language that the application is programmed or configured in. The common components that may be using double byte characters are the following:

• Server host name
• Credentials and accounts
• File paths and registry entries
• Unicode support for shortnames
• Menu items
• Different delimiters used in other localities

Additionally, this functionality extends to AppZero's COTF functionality so that changes can be made in configuration files to support application rehosting. With double byte support, AppZero now enables application migration and cloud onboarding of all application types around the world.

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