"We are looking at launching the product in more Indian languages includingTamil and Marathi," he said. The company had earlier finalised plans tolaunch Office 2000 in Sanskrit and Gujarati.Sonata Software is assistingMicrosoft in developing content for the office suite like thesaurus, spellchecks, etc. The company has given beta versions to state governments towork and accord various suggestions for further refinement. Work on theHindi version commenced earlier this year.Microsoft launched its earlierversion of Windows in most Asian languages such as Chinese, Taipei andJapanese but Padmanabhan said that it found the English version to be highlysuitable for this country. He said that surveys have shown that the Englishspeaking community use PCs more.

"Our move to launch local versions will help increase penetration andproliferation of personal computers in India," he said. Worldwide, estimateshave shown that there are 50 million users for Office 97 with over 100million licences being sold. MS Office is also the second most populardeveloping medium for developers after C and C++, he said."Our prime targetsfor the Office local language versions are government agencies and schools,"Padmanabhan said, adding that it is already working on similar projects withNational Informatics Centre (NIC) and the Centre for Development of AdvancedComputing (C-DAC) for developing Indian standards for such big applicationssuites.Microsoft is holding a series of Office deployment conferences acrossthe country with Mumbai being the next venue. The company is launching itsknowledge management development tools in India during these events.