We are selling a Windows Syslog daemon (WinSyslog) for many, many years now (since 1995 if I remember correctly). Interesting is the “language issue”. Back at the late 90s, we had English and German pages for that product. Some time later, we dropped the German pages because almost nobody ever accessed them (funny, ain’t it?).
Now we are giving it another shot. While talking with some peers, they claimed there is more demand for German language in IT security today than it was 10 years ago. Really? If so, I have to admit I am surprised. I thought that the IT world speaks English and the IT security/auditing world even more so. Anyhow, I always like to experiment. So we at Adiscon agreed to translate some important content of the WinSyslog pages into German and see what happens.
As a side-note, the discussion with my peers started another experiment which did not require discussions inside the company. Rsyslog got a German language support forum in October 2008. Guess what? There is only a single user post in it, and that post tells that the poster thinks it is unnecessary to have a German language forum. So far, it looks like I was right – but let’s see what a product site brings ;) (It sounds somewhat logical that an open source support forum has different metrics than an commercial software product site, so I think there really can be different results).