We have been running the new Sametime 7.5 at the office since its release and I must say that I’m impressed. The UI is slick and the new features have made it an up2date IM client. The small issues we had getting the server installed was, I guess, minor and could be expected. I have blogged about a couple of the issues previously.
I have an issue with the real-time spellchecking though. The feature is nice but apparently the spellcheck language follows the UI language which means that I cannot run the UI in English and have the spellcheck in Danish which is my native language. Separate options for UI language and spellcheck language would be nice. If IBM decides to do this I also think that they should consider letting the user set the spellcheck language from the button bar of the IM window for easy on-the-fly switching.
The real problem is that we don’t have a Danish dictionary right now (and it also seems that the default dictionary is always English). I agree that it would be a helpful option to provide a choice at install to select which dictionary to use; I believe the reason we didn’t do this is to keep from having to package all language dictionaries into the client download.
Administrators can create a site that
will allow users to install dictionaries as a feature, or individual users can just copy the plugin folder for the
dictionary to the plugin folder of their Sametime client.
More details from the Sametime release notes:
The spell checker will default to English for languages it does not support. Supported languages in this release:
01 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.fi_FI (Finish – Finland)
02 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.fr_FR (French)
03 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.de_DE_Reform (German)
04 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.el_GR (Greek)
05 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.it_IT (Italian)
06 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.nb_NO (Norwegian Bokmal)
07 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.pl_PL (Polish)
08 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.pt_PT (Portuguese – Portugal)
09 – com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.pt_BR (Portuguese – Brazil)
10- com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.ru_RU (Russian)
11- com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.es_ES (Spanish)
12- com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.sv_SE (Swedish)
Okay – I didn’t look at the release notes but I have now and they confirm what you are saying. By reading your comments and the release notes I gather that there is no way to switch between spellchecking languages even though you install additional dictionaries via a feature from the server. Correct?
Investigating a little further I think we use the IBM “langware”-plugin but need an additional preferences page as well to be able to switch among dictionaries unless you redeploy the IBM “langware”-plugin dictionaries part and manually edit the fragment.xml file to change the dictionary used.