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Special Thanks to Steven Westwell for his knowledge and experience with Windows and Office localisation.  His assistance was instrumental in discovering the information contained in this article.  Steven’s blog can be found here: http://stevenwestwell.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/ocs-localisation/

Generally speaking, the documentation for the Office Communications Server 2007 product suite is very good.  One of the areas that is lacking however is information required for large-scale client deployments.

We’re currently in the midst of an 80,000 user global roll-out of the Office Communicator 2007 and Live Meeting 2007 clients.  In the absence of comprehensive documentation on language localisation (or “localization”, depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re on), we’ve done some extensive testing.  Here’s what we’ve learned:

I.  First things first

There are 3 client components required for OCS 2007:

1. Office Communicator 2007 – supports IM and Presence, Audio/Video conferencing, Telephony Call-Control, Voice calls, and File Transfer.
2. Live Meeting 2007 – supports Web Conferencing, Audio/Video conferencing, Whiteboard, and other forms of data collaboration.  This client is also required if you plan to deploy the RoundTable device.
3. Outlook Add-In for Conference Scheduling – This enables a user to schedule conferences using the Outlook calendar. 

Office Communicator 2007 and Live Meeting 2007 behave differently with respect to language localization.

II.  Office Communicator 2007 – Language & Localisation Settings 

Office Communicator 2007 now supports the full set of 37 Microsoft Office languages:

To set the Office Communicator language manually, first install the Communicator 2007 Multi-Language User Interface (MUI) Pack, which is available for download here:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=86DE1E77-3406-475A-9271-24F507E20972&displaylang=en

Then, use the Options > General configuration page to select the language as shown in this screenshot. (Note that Communicator must restarted for the changes to take effect.)

Optionally, the Office Communicator 2007 language can be set programmatically, by modifying the following registry key:

HKCU\software\Microsoft\Communicator\Language : REG_DWORD : <language code>

If you are planning to set the OC 2007 language to be machine-specific (rather than user-specific) , such as during the OS build process, you could use the following registry key instead:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Communicator MUI\Default Language : REG_DWORD : <language code>

III.  Live Meeting 2007 Console – Language & Localisation Settings

In the current version of the software, there is no integration between language settings for OC 2007 and LM 2007.   According to a source at Microsoft, this will change for the next version of the Live Meeting client when the LM client is re-written “from the ground up”.

The Live Meeting 2007 Client (aka LM 2007 Console) supports the following 14 languages:

Note: There is no MUI Pack for LM 2007.  These 14 languages ship as part of the base LM 2007 installation executable.

Unfortunately, there is no way to manually set the LM 2007 client language.  If the Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista operating system has a language pack installed, then the LM 2007 client will automatically detect the Operating System’s language and use that.  This is the language that is specified in Control Panel > Regional and Language Settings, as shown in the screenshot below:

For example, if you have the English, French, and Japanese OS language packs installed, you would select the regional option for the desired language.  If you only have a single language pack installed(for example, only Japanese), the LM 2007 console will use Japanese by default.

This means that you must have an OS Language Pack installed in order to change the LM 2007 language… and the LM 2007 client cannot be in a different from the OS language.

This also means that you could have Office Communicator set to a different language than LM.  The best practice for deployments would seem to be to automatically set OC to be the same language as the OS (rather than the same language as Office, if the OS and Office are in different languages) to ensure that OC and LM always end up being in the same language.

IV.    Outlook Add-In for Conferencing – Language & Localisation Settings

The Outlook Add-In for Conference Scheduling will automatically change to the default language that Office is configured to use.   We didn’t test all 37 of the supported Office languages to see if the add-in  supports all of them, but it did support the western and non-western languages that we tried.

V.  Previous Versions

For completeness, I’m including the languages supported by previous versions of the the clients, which is a subset of the languages supported in the current 2007 versions.

• Office Communicator 2005 supported the following 12 languages (in addition to English) via a MUI Pack:  Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Italian, German, French, Chinese – Traditional, Chinese – Simplified, Danish, Finnish, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish
• The Office Live Meeting 2005 client supported the following 7 languages (no MUI Pack required): French, German, Spanish, English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese – Simplified
• The Office Live Meeting 2003 client supported only English. 

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Technorati Tags: Office Communicator, Live Meeting, Software Localization