Introduction
Microsoft has been pioneering the Indian language computing to promote IT usage among the majority of the non-English speaking Indian population. As lack of local content can be attributed to the poor computer usage in rural India, the company determined to address the ‘language divide’.
It felt the need to encourage the active involvement of developers, linguists, academicians, the end user of IT products and students, who will contribute towards the development and use of Indian languages for PC usage.
Microsoft conceived http://bhashaindia.com as a common platform for people from these sections to interact and contribute to the Indian language computing movement. The portal was launched in October, 2003.
Vishwak’s Solutions
However, Microsoft realised that it had to outsource the management of the community to a reliable technology company, which also had the ability to sustain a long standing relationship with content developers in regional languages.
Microsoft chose to partner with the Chennai-based Vishwak Solutions, as the latter has the proven technology leadership in .Net platform and Microsoft Content Management System, besides expertise in content development, aggregation and localization.
Vishwak’s Solutions
Vishwak Solutions’ solution architecture encompassed services that span across three different domains of web/portal technology, content and community development.
Technology Development:
Vishwak developed the portal template, content management system (CMS) exclusively for the Bhasha portal. The CMS was developed using Microsoft Content Management System using .Net and SQL Server.
The company had also built web features such as events, calendar, solution directory, expert chat online, contests, quiz, etc that are built using custom codes. Vishwak also created administration tools to manage the contests, forums and generate metrics on the usage, downloads, etc.
Vishwak customised the portal for several Indian languages. It published content in Unicode standards so that the visitors who want to read the regional content do not have to download and install any fonts or software. The Unicode content also meant that the site is searchable. The users can type the words in local languages and get the suitable search result.
To enable faster access by concurrent users, Vishwak built a secure server farm.
Content Development
Vishwak evolved the content strategy for the entire portal to effectively address the two different categories of users namely the developer community and the non-developer linguists and end users. It partnered with 6 content developers to develop content in local languages to suit the audience of the technical and non-technical community.
As the ongoing portal management partner, Vishwak publishes contemporary articles, tools, tutorials, resources, downloads, community glossary, solutions directory, news, success stories, case studies in Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Konkani, Oriya, Sanskrit and Nepali languages.
Community Development
To promote the community, Vishwak is organising panel of experts who are actively involved in conducting workshops, quiz contests, student outreach programs. It moderates the highly successful Basha India forums on various technical topics.
Vishwak also partners with third party solution providers to introduce various community features.
The company is also organising offline promotional events such as developer meets. It offers free downloads of tools such as font tools, Tamil IME, TBIL data converter, MS Office language interface packs and LIP packs for the users to install Operating Systems in local languages.
Further, through the Solutions Directory, it allows small businesses and individuals to freely market their Indian language applications and fonts to their target audience.
Benefits to the Client
With over several thousand registered users, BhashaIndia has emerged as a true community portal, acting as a perfect platform to post queries discuss and debate issues.
The portal continues to grow by the day and has become a one stop center for all resources related to Indian language computing such as articles, latest news, snippets of interesting information and resources like applications related to Indic computing.
Bhasha Microsoft Portal.pdf