CRM 2015 Product Catalog Localization

How can Sales operations managers or customizers localize the product catalog for different regions?

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM introduced many great new features. One of them is the new product catalog.

I like the families, the bundles, the connection between the products and all other features.

Unfortunately, one great feature is not mentioned much in the official material.

It is the Localization. Microsoft says:

"Sales operations managers or customizers can localize the product catalog for different regions with localization tools."

What it really means, is that you can now have the product names translated into different languages.

Many of our customers who sell their products or services in more countries were asking for this feature, so we had to create custom fields for names and descriptions and modify the reports and the export to work with such a customization.

Now it is not necessary anymore. The product fields such as name can be translated to any language enabled in CRM.

Before you can use this feature, you need to enable more than one language in your CRM. Once you have done that, go to Data management section and click Export Field Translations.

Three steps to localize product names

You will get a zip file, which contains two XML files. Do NOT modify [Content_Types].xml file. Just open the CrmFieldTranslations.xml file in Excel.

The structure of the file is similar to the file for editing translations of customizations, so if you have done that, it will be very easy to use this file as well.

You can then import the translations back into the CRM in the Data management section. When you import, it is reflected automatically. No need for publishing.

As this is new feature in CRM 2015, it has some limitations:

• So for now, you can have only product name in different languages, fields such as description or productid are not supported for translations
• You can translate only name fields of the Product properties and Optionsets names in the properties
• You can only translate to the languages which are enabled in CRM and the name in different languages appears after the user changes his/her language. If you do not translate to some language, then the default value is used (the one of the basic language)

So I hope, this will help you with this promising feature.

Michal