Standards are finally consistent with the desired level of internationalisation for distributed computing. But most implementations do a poor job of providing intuitive solutions for heterogeneous multinational interconnectivity. Most international and industry standards bodies are addressing the problems of global systems. And virtually all standards have already adopted Unicode. But that doesn't mean the integration tasks for an international system will be easy.

Unicode is a solution for most of the current problems in global distributed systems development and management. Many common distributed applications can benefit from Unicode now, if they don;t already. There are several methods for implementing robust global distributed systems using Unicode within the framework of existing standards for distributed computing.

New, Unicode-enabled technologies will be discussed as to their role in helping legacy enterprises solve their global issues. Specifically, Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI), Java, and XML will be looked at from a systems-level view as tools for portability and universal data transmission. The Internet and the WWW will be inspected briefly, with respect to Unicode, as to their role in globalising user interfaces and increasing application and data accessibility. Various Unicode-based implementations will be discussed as case-studies for how different organizations have adopted Unicode to solve their distributed application and communication problems.