SharePoint Multi-Language Site Variations
I've spent the better part of the last month creating a proof of concept for multi-language site variations using SharePoint 2007. For whatever reason, I had a huge mental block about site variations. I must have created my site 10 times, setting it up, attempting to make it work and then deleting it figuring I screwed it up. What I've come away with is that site variations are really cool but there are some loose ends that you have to tie up yourself.
First, site variations can be used for more than multi-lingual implementations. I can see variations being quite useful in the case of multi-branding and other similar situations. Essentially, site variations allow you to dictate a "source" site and then set up "copies" of your source site. Anytime an item is PUBLISHED in the source site, a copy is automatically created in all of your site copies (we'll call them target sites). One of the key concepts here is that the content in the source site must be approved and published before it will appear in the target site(s). This includes all resources that a content page might contain. So, for example, if you publish PageX which contains ImageY and some text but ImageY is not yet approved and published. PageX will get copied to your target site(s) but the image will not appear until it too has been approved and published. It takes a bit of coordination if your resources live in a different library with a different approval workflow to keep things coordinated but it works very nicely overall. Once the new page is created in the target site(s), the owner(s) of the target are notified of the new page and the approval process for that site begins.
One place where I think the variations support is lacking is that the only "content" which is copied is publishing content. This means pages and resources. Any other content is not included in the variations support and will not get copied over. You can, of course, create support for this yourself. That's the magic of SharePoint.
Where I got confused was the discussion of Translation Management Libraries. I thought, at first, that somehow variations and TML were connected. They aren't. The TML simply gives you a document library with preconfigured translation workflow to assist in the management of content translations. When you create a new document in a TML, copies are created for all targeted translations and notifications are sent to the owners of that language content providing them with a copy of the source document and a task to complete the translation. Once they've completed their translation and marked their task complete, the workflow ends. There is no automatic process to then send the translated documents to target variations you have created. Again, the beauty of SharePoint is that you can extend the TML to do this but it is a customization and not out of the box.
Now let's get to the fun part. What are the coolest aspects of Enterprise Content Management using SharePoint 2007:
1. Built In Approval Workflow
2. Compare Text Changes
3. Checking for unpublished items. This is a pretty cool and handy feature. If you are editing a page, you can click a button and SharePoint will highlight with big huge red dotted borders which pieces of the entire page are unpublished.
4. Variations themselves.
5. Using Word's research pane to target translations.
6. Using Word to create content and converting that content into HTML using the built-in Document Converter.
Happy Multi-Language SharePointing.