GlobalLink, Transperfect’s enterprise translation management system, is only available for enterprise customers. While enterprise customers love the system for its customizability and serviced approach – with dedicated support engineers configuring all their processes -, translation vendors working in GlobalLink do not share the same positive experience. One thing is clear though: GlobalLink is definitely a strong and influential technology solution with more than 5000 client installations and 9 billion words running through it, and it is supported by 200+ developers.
If you are a language service provider working for companies in their impressive list of clients, but the name of your company is not Transperfect, chances are that you don’t have any means of automating Project Director. Project Director is the project management element of GlobalLink. GlobalLink does not provide any APIs for vendors.
At BeLazy, we imitate how your project manager would work in a web browser, and this is how we enable interoperability between GlobalLink and your business management system.
Why beta?
GlobalLink is a flexible, customizable system, and this is probably why it sells very well. However, the drawback for the automators is that each GlobalLink instance can be slightly different from others. Together with customers, we have experimented with four different GlobalLink instances, and each of them were slightly different. Therefore, we don’t have the confidence to say that you should just configure it in BeLazy and it will work without a hitch. However, we do believe that after having connected to about 10-20 systems, full automation without any complication is possible in the majority of the cases.
What does the GlobalLink integration do and not do?
As of today, the BeLazy GlobalLink Project Director integration allows you to receive and claim submissions and tasks in Project Director and create the corresponding project with all the project files and metadata in your business management system. It supports multilingual projects with multiple tasks (e.g. translation and review) and downloading materials such as Wordfast packages, and source and reference file packages.
In the near future, we plan to reach a full project workflow: claiming the tasks, downloading materials, assigning vendors (as vendor PMs / admins) for each task and delivering them when completed.
We have also implemented integration with Transperfect’s own GlobalLink instance for Transperfect vendors, which is different from the mainstream system they sell.
So far, the GlobalLink integration is already providing value in three important workflows to our customers.
What business management systems are supported?
XTRF (classic and smart projects) and Plunet are supported for project creation.
BeLazy’s extensive APIs provide a way to connect other easy-to-integrate systems and get access to a large number of translation management systems and vendor portal integrations. It’s the single implementation that you need to prepare your business management system to handle any automated content. Our implementation services can help you keep the integration project on track, liaising with your internal or external development team(s).
The BeLazy APIs already contain the calls necessary to achieve full 360-degrees integration. Given the complexity of the GlobalLink projects, we only plan to implement full integration with XTRF’s classic projects in the next two months.
I am interested, what next?
If you are interested in the GlobalLink integration, even if the project volume is not very high yet, please get in touch with us. We can show you how the BeLazy GlobalLink Project Director integration works and discuss other potential TMS integration needs.
We offer access to a test system where you can test the integration yourself, whether the system you’re planning to connect to works out-of-the-box. If it does not, we can help you identify what goes wrong and either fix it or discuss your options in case it requires developing additional functionally.
