White Paper
Localizing BMC Remedyforce
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Eric J Cobb
17 March 2015
Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Welcome to the “Getting Started with BMC Remedyforce”
Series
Today’s IT departments must drive business growth and innovation, while coping with less resources and increasing complexity. To
do this, they require an IT Service Management solution that provides best practices while minimizing costs. BMC Remedyforce is
built on Salesforce—the world's most widely used cloud platform—to deliver complete IT service management functionality with the
secure social, mobile, and collaborative capabilities users expect.
With the “Getting Started with Remedyforce” white paper series, our aim is to help you leverage BMC Remedyforce to improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of your ITSM operations. Each paper addresses a specific area of interest and provides you with
conceptual, functional and technical best practices to make configuration decisions and take action to gain value from your BMC
Remedyforce investment.
Localizing BMC Remedyforce
Having the ability to translate into different languages is a key feature of the Salesforce Platform, and is increasingly becoming
more of a factor when implementing Remedyforce across multiple geographical locations. With Remedyforce today, we can
localize into five languages natively. The purpose of this white paper is to explain the capabilities and limitations of leveraging the
Salesforce platform and Remedyforce to support multiple languages.
Localization – Application in BMC Remedyforce
Remedyforce supports 5 core languages out of the box today, which are Japanese, German, Spanish, French, and US English.
What gives us this ability on the Salesforce platform is the Translation Workbench. When the Translation Workbench is enabled, it
takes the language setting of the user that is logged in into consideration and translates the information into the appropriate
language. One of the key items to understand about translation is that we are only translating the fields and field labels. The data
within these fields does not translate natively!
When having discussions with customers who have different geographical locations to support, it is recommended that they decide
as an organization what their primary language will be. This is a key first step as the ability to translate data within the fields inside
Remedyforce is not supported. Remedyforce data consists of Categories, Accounts, Templates, Status, Impact, Urgency, and
Service Requests. The information that is stored within the field values is also considered data, for example, if a description is input
in French and you have an English support queue, the English support queue will see that information in French. This is a concept
that is not well understood when making decisions regarding translation.
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Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Figure 1 - English Staff Member View
Figure 2 - French Staff Member View
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Translation – Configuration Steps
This section includes specific steps with screenshot examples, to help you configure Remedyforce for use in different language, as
well as assist with translating field values.
The first step to utilizing the Translation Workbench is enabling it. Below are the steps with screenshots to accomplish this. To
begin, click Setup.
Next go to Administration Setup>Translation Workbench>Translation Settings. Click on Translation Settings.
Now you will need to enable the Translation Workbench by clicking ENABLE.
Once you enable the Translation Workbench, you will be able to select your supported languages.
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Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Remember, Remedyforce can only be translated in the 5 languages out of the box. (English, French, German, Spanish &
Japanese)
Remedyforce can also do field label overrides after the Translation Workbench is enabled. This allows for customers to change the
out of the box field labels from what they are to what they would like them to be, without having to recreate similar fields to fit their
needs. This is accomplished by utilizing the Override functionality within the Translation Workbench. When you select Override in
the Translation Workbench, you will need to select the package as BMC Remedyforce, choose one of the 5 supported languages,
select the component (Custom Label) and then select the Object. Below are screenshots of how to override some commonly
requested field values. This example is for the field Request Definition. You can see that we changed the Field Label to Service
Request to make it more intuitive for the customer as highlighted.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Localization – Self-Service in Remedyforce
Remedyforce can also translate the field labels in Self-Service by changing the custom labels. This allows customers to create their
self-service portal in a way that better fits into their organization. It also allows customers the ability to change the field labels that
come out of the box with Remedyforce. The main areas that customers typically change with this functionality are the tile name and
tile descriptions.
For this, we will need to actually go to a different area to accomplish this. Navigate to Setup>Create>Custom Labels and create a
view for anything that starts with SS. This allows us to only see the fields that are associated with Self-Service.
Now we will need to locate the actual field that we want to rename. The easiest way to do this is to sort by the value. You can do
this easily by clicking on the value header and it will sort the order alphabetically ascending. Click it again and you can have it
sorted alphabetically descending. This makes it a lot easier to find the actual field value that you want to translate.
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Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
After you find the value that you would like to translate, simply select the name of the field. Here we are going to change the tile for
Submit a Ticket to Need Assistance.
This is what the tile looks like with the out of the box value before we do the translation/override.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
The next step is to select the New Local Translations/Override button. This allows us to override the actual current value that is
displayed on the tile. Once we select that button, then we have to tell it to which language we wish to translate. We are going to
select English here and then input the new value that we wish to see in that tile.
Select Save and then when you go to the Self Service portal, you will see the new tile name.
You can see that we have changed the tile label with little effort, but now it says exactly what you need in your environment.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Branding Your Service Desk
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
In Summary
As you can see, the Translation Workbench is a very powerful tool with the Salesforce Platform. It allows you the ability to
manipulate the languages presented in the Remedyforce solution to make it more your own. There is more information on the
localization capabilities of the Translation Workbench available on our product wiki.
BMC Remedyforce also has an extremely active user community where you can get answers to additional questions on this topic.
We encourage you to take a look at bmc.com/communities.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
BMC delivers software solutions that help IT transform digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive business advantage. We have
worked with thousands of leading companies to create and deliver powerful IT management services. From mainframe to cloud to
mobile, we pair high-speed digital innovation with robust IT industrialization—allowing our customers to provide amazing user
experiences with optimized IT performance, cost, compliance, and productivity. We believe that technology is the heart of every
business, and that IT drives business to the digital age.
BMC – Bring IT to Life.