Platform Language In BusinessObjects Enterprise

This post is a clarification about the language settings in the platform when installing BusinessObjects Enterprise (BOE). When installing the Enterprise platform you get an dialog box at the very beginning that asks about the language that is to be used during installation (Please Choose Setup Language). This is the language that the Central Management Server (CMS) will use.



The default language selected in the dialog box is based on the Regional Options of the operating system. You can change this to any language you want. But be aware! The selection you make here is pretty permanent. The only way to change this is to create a new CMS database and migrate the old database over to the new database. But as you don't have any option to choose which language to be used when you create a new CMS database you can do the language selection through the Regional Options. When you create a new CMS database it uses
the language in the Regional Options as the CMS language. Here are a short summary of the steps needed to change language in an already installed environment.

1. Change the Regional Options of the server OS to the language you want in the BOE platform.- Create a new CMS database.
2. Migrate the old CMS database to the new one.
3. Change the regional settings of the server back to the original language.
4. Re point BOE to the new CMS database.

Why is this important? For a couple of reasons. I have used the above method to change language to English when the BOE platform has been installed in a country specific language. When you have a country specific language set in the CMS much of the error messages and log entries are in that language. When you want to use the error message it could be difficult to translate it to English. It is much more difficult to find a solution when you don't have the exact error message to go by. If you must create a case with SAP Support it is impossible for them to read some of the error messages. And in that case you must translate all error messages to English manually.