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Blog - (A bunch more on) TransPort

(A bunch more on) TransPort

posted 2007-05-01 16:48:47
by Chase Tingley

I think when Andrew asked me to write blog posts during WorldSummit, he was hoping I would chime in with little updates now and then. He should have known better -- when I start talking, I can keep going for a while.

I sat in this morning on the TransPort training session led by Christine and Marina. TransPort is the name for the user portal in WorldServer 9, replacing the Service Desk portal available in previous versions. TransPort isn't something I've had a lot of interaction with since the early spec review, so pretty interesting to see how far it's come.

The new name underlines what a massive improvement TransPort is. Coming into the WorldServer 9 development cycle, we knew that Service Desk -- although a useful feature under certain conditions -- was lacking some key pieces that prevented many customers from adopting it. This time around, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the system flexible enough to meet everyone's needs.

One critical gap was the ability to deal with quotes. Quoting is an integral part of many translation projects. Previously, a translation vendor and their customer would need to use an secondary channel for communicating and reviewing quote information, with no way of tying that to WorldServer. TransPort solves this problem by adding quotes as a first-level object on par with projects. Now, quotes the quote approval process can be tracked directly from TransPort, and the results associated with a subsequent project.

Another new addition was the ability to create and manage Project Types.
Project Types are a more flexible generalization of Content Categories in Service Desk -- a top-level abstraction that bundles together all the details associated with a particular type of work. Unlike Content Categories, which were bound to an AIS location, the Project Type can be selected when a project is created.

TransPort, though, wasn't just about filling in missing pieces -- a lot of time went into designing a system that was truly useable and customizable. A common complaint with Service Desk was the rigidity of the UI. When deploying a user portal, being able to control the presentation is important, so TransPort is built to allow this: simple presentation changes via CSS, more advanced page hacking with SDK-based UI hooks. Other aspects are controllable as well -- every action can be restricted through permissions, the workflows can be edited normally, etc.

More generally, this is one of the difficulties of building localization software -- localization is process-driven, and the details of those processes vary wildly. Every year I come to WorldSummit and watch customer presentations, and I'm always amazed how everyone does things a little bit differently. As far as the general design philosophy of WorldServer 9, I think we've been much more deeply committed in this release to not just building features, but building them in such a way that individual customers can tailor them to fit the specific needs. This is a long-term challenge, and there are still a lot of improvements to be made, but WorldServer 9 should be a big step forward.

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