SharePoint Online Language Packs

Following the post the Microsoft Online Services team on their blog that they would expand the number of languages, SharePoint Online is now available in more languages than the languages first made available. I have just created a Dutch SharePoint teamsite. Other available languages in SharePoint Online are:

English Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Finnish French

German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Italian Japanese Kazakh Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish

Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian

The language of a site can be selected when creating a new SharePoint site:

After this a new SharePoint Online site is populated in the requested language (see example below in Dutch):

Comments

[Erik Vos]

Danny,

Thx for the update.

Changing the English Language into Dutch for already created sites seems not possible.
Would be nice because Dutch customers have already started using BPOS SharePoint in English.

but I think this is also not possible within "normal" (not BPOS) SharePoint environment

Erik

[Danny Burlage]

Hi Erik,

Het klopt dat bestaande sites niet zijn te migreren naar de nieuwe taalinstellingen. Helaas kent SharePoint als product die beperking. Het is echter wel mogelijk een site te migreren naar een nieuwe site met de nieuwe taalinstellingen. Het gaat dan echter puur om inhoud en kan soms een kostbare aangelegenheid zijn.

Danny

[Pieter Veenstra]

Once you started using a Language Pack in SharePoint we found that custom web parts also need to be transalated. Isn't it a real shame that most web parts that you find on the internet are only available in English?

At Content and Code we have made all of our products available in any language that you like (We started with Dutch, but we can make other language available on request).

An example of this is our People Directory web part which is now available in Dutch:

http://www.contentandcode.com/webparts/PeopleDirectory/Pages/NL_default.aspx

Is custom web parts in your local language something that is useful to you or are you happy with web parts being just available in English?