Language support

[anders.ostling]

Me again

Can scalix store and forward mail messages in fx Japanse and other non-westen languages? We have full Unicode support as a requirement, so we need to understand the limitations of any product that we will consider as replacement for our existing mail system.

I understand that the language issues have many faces, but I would appreciate any input in the internationalization & language area.

Thanks
Anders

[ScalixSupport]

Anders,

there is a lot of work going into the next Scalix release with regards to additional character set support and especially UTF8. I'll let PM respond to as to when this all going to be rolled out.

Are you referring to mainly eastern-european charactersets (ISO 8859-2)?

If you give us a list of character sets you need, that would be best.

Cheers,

Sascha.

[anders.ostling]

Anders,

there is a lot of work going into the next Scalix release with regards to additional character set support and especially UTF8. I'll let PM respond to as to when this all going to be rolled out.

Are you referring to mainly eastern-european charactersets (ISO 8859-2)?

If you give us a list of character sets you need, that would be best.

Cheers,

Sascha.

There is no absolute list, but I know that Japanase (kanjii ?) is very high on the list of required languages.

Anders

[florian]

Hi Anders,

our current version, Scalix 10, supportes Western European character sets only (i.e. mainly ISO-8859-1). Some others are known to work in part of the system (some japanese i.e. will work well in SWA, etc.).

Good news is that the next major release of scalix ("Scalix 11??") will actually have full Unicode support and client-wise support all languages that have left-to-right scripts - that would include Japanese. This will become available in Q3/2006.

What would be the timeframe for your deployment? If you get in touch with myself (<firstname>@scalix.com) or our sales team (which, assuming you are in Europe, will probably get you back on my desk for technical questions), we can certainly also discuss if there is a possibility to preview something here earlier if we talk about this individually.

Cheers,
Florian.[/url]

[gren]

Just some extra clarification, the work we are currently doing to improve internationalisation for a future release involves support for multiple character sets (those offered by the "iconv" framework), so messages with text and subjects originally in character sets like ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and SHIFT_JIS will be supported.

[Chris.deb]

Just some extra clarification, the work we are currently doing to improve internationalisation for a future release involves support for multiple character sets (those offered by the "iconv" framework), so messages with text and subjects originally in character sets like ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP and SHIFT_JIS will be supported.

Groovy !!!!

Future means Q3 as I heard as gossip ?
Means all like following will work ?

あいうえお Hiragana
アイウエオ Katakana
漢字 Kanji
アイウエオ Katakana (hankaku)

This would so great when it's working well though the whole system (SWA, Qutlook, Folders, ...).

Cheers
Christian

[florian]

;-) Chris - i hope you know what you were writing there, and it wasn't a really bad insult, but ...

... the answer is yes, this is what's going to happen.
... and yes, timeframe for this is Q3/2006
... and certainly we'll want to work with some of you guys beforehand to give this a test run.

-- Florian.

[burhankhalid]

Guys, please also test out Arabic support. This is something that is really blocking Scalix adoption for many of my clients.

I have many clients here that really like the cost benefits of Scalix vs. Exchange and Lotus -- but they cannot migrate because of the lack of Arabic support.

Due to the large Windows user base, the character that is used is windows-1256 -- but utf-8 is also in wide use.

I would be extrememly grateful if this was put in your list of characterset/encodings/languages to support.

[florian]

BHK,

thanks for your message; from a server perspective, Arabic will just work as any character sets supported by the Linux GNU/iconv framework. You can check yourself at http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv, but CP-1256 is on the list, as is ISO-8859-8 and obviously all flaviours of Unicode including UTF-8.

On the client side, I would expect no major issues in standard IMAP clients as well as in Outlook; the one thing I'm not sure about at this point is SWA - not because of the character set support, that obviously comes from and through the browser, rather because of the right-to-left script Arabic is using.

We'll see how it goes. If you could tell me a bit more about your business case and your role in all this, it might be helpful. You can also contact me directly as <givenname>@scalix.com, if you want to take this "offline".

Thanks,
Florian.

[burhankhalid]

As a test, I had a friend of mine send me an email from Hotmail that was written in Arabic, and I tried to open it in Outlook using the Scalix connector.

The text came out 'grabled', ie, no character set information was available.

I am doing some informal testing on my end of Arabic as I get messages; but since its not the primary business language at my company, the testing that I am doing is only casual.

The RTL/LTR thing is not such a big problem with Outlook (as you pointed out) because there is a client-side feature that allows text direction to be switched. The only concern is how this would affect SWA and transferring of the information between Windows (windows-1256) to Linux (where it gets converted or maybe it doesn't? I don't know exactly) and then back to Outlook or SWA.

[florian]

Hi,

I should possibly have added that the statements made by myself w/rgds to Outlook are what you'll see in the next major release of Scalix; the current version will not support the character sets mentioned in Outlook.

If you have access to a Arabic OS (I don't right now), what happens with the browser...
- does FF switch LTR/RTL as well? Does IE?
- what happens if you run SWA today in such an environment (the message will probably not go through unharmed as, again, we don't support the character set as of today), what I'm interested in is the real client side of it...

-- Thx,
Florian.