Variations and Multiple Languages Sites
Many companies operate globally, and even in their home markets they often must appeal to a diverse customer base that speaks multiple languages. This diversity often requires that their Web presence sites be tailored for markets of different cultures and geographic regions.
Maintaining a number of similar versions, or variations, of a Web presence site is difficult and time consuming because of the need to coordinate the creation and updating of content between all of the different variations.
To simplify this process, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a site variation management system. Site managers can define a series of site variations and mark one such variation as the primary variation. Changes to the source variation can be automatically or manually propagated to target variations. This ensures that changes that are made in the sources are properly reconciled in all other variations. This system is integrated with workflow and content import/export to enable integration with third-party translation services. New updates to target variations can use the workflow system to automatically send updates for translation. When translation is completed, updates can be imported and set for final approval through the workflow system.
Variations can be used for publishing related sites or pages, either for use in multilingual content or for device targeting.
Note
More information on variations and multiple language sites will be added in future releases of the SDK.
In This Section
- How to: Customize the Variation Root Landing Logic
Learn how to set and customize a variation landing page.
- How to: Customize the Variations Label Control Logic
Learn how to create variation label controls that allow users to display the corresponding variation pages that are available for a given page.