MOSS Variations … Alternative approach

Variations in SharePoint 2007 work well if you have direct translations from one main language into one or many languages, but if you want a more flexible solution to cater for having pages in other languages but not the source language then you can’t do that with the out-of-the-box approach.

For example, under the standard approach:

A global company has a multi-lingual website with content predominately in English. I setup my source variation as EN (English). I also create FR (French) and DE (German) variation labels. I create a page under EN and submit to FR and / or DE.

* User creates a page in the English site.




* User submits the variations of the page into the French and German sites.





* User can create pages in both the French and German sites, but this is regionalised content and cannot be translated using variations







The company has a page targeted at French and German visitors only. The normal process is to create a page in the source variation (in the above example this is "EN") and submit to a number of variations, but in this case I don’t want it to appear in English.

A solution would be to:

1. Create the source variation label as a neutral label ie called “CMS”.
2. Click on create hierarchies and build the site structure as you did before.
3. Create a variation label for each of the desired languages.
4. Click on create hierarchies.
   

You can now create a page in the “CMS” section and submit to French and German. The out-of-the-box multi-lingual switching control and landing page functionality will need to change in order to hide the “CMS” variation from the menu and landing logic. This approach is similar to the multi-lingual concept of master and slave sites in MCMS 2002.