It gives me great pleasure to announce the General Availability of SDL WorldServer 11.3 (as of November 27, 2017). This version builds upon the great work we have delivered in prior releases this year, with a focus on Translation Quality Assurance and Metrics. The highlight of this release is the ability to round-trip the Quality Model/TQA definition from WorldServer to SDL Trados Studio and back again, ensuring a unified supply chain for the increasingly important activity of capturing translation quality measurements. By storing these data in a centralized location, we are extending the management capabilities of the WorldServer platform, while enabling the usage of Studio as the tool-of-choice for recording the details of the translation quality evaluations.

Additionally, SDL WorldServer 11.3 delivers a new automated QA Checker that can be added to any workflow to execute validation for the correct inclusion of any or all of the following:

• Target text the same as source
• Inline tags (to guarantee the integrity of the translated file)
• Numeric values (to ensure accurate rendering of measurements, and any numbers)
• Terminology (to follow approved market-specific terms)

Both of these features are explained in videos in the Release Notes available here.

In addition to this, SDL WorldServer 11.3 brings other customer-requested features and fixes:

• E-mail notifications for tasks with modified dates
• Continued platform update (support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016)
• 2 new server-friendly FTS file types (RTF and Excel), no longer dependent on an installation of Microsoft Office
• A significant number of defect fixes

Important: in addition to updating the File Type support, we are also removing 3 deprecated file types as part of the upgrade to SDL WorldServer 11.3:

• Delimited Text File Type (Deprecated)
• HTML File Type (Deprecated)
• Microsoft Word 2007-2016 File Type (Deprecated)

However if those file types are still in use we cannot remove them via upgrade scripts and you should check as part of your upgrade planning if these file types are in use in the system. A file type is considered in use if either of the following holds true:

• it has a non-default filter configuration
• it is part of a filter group

If this is the case the system should be configured to replace them with the newer (non-deprecated) version of the file type before attempting the upgrade.

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

Ray Hopley
Director, Product Management – SDL WorldServer