Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

13.3. Working with Variations

When you design an Internet-facing website or corporate intranet, you may need to present it in multiple languages. This may simply mean providing users access to documents in multiple languages, or you may need all your content — web page and interface elements — in multiple languages. In the latter case, if your content is in one language, such as English, you must translate documents into other languages, but the system should support and manage this process.

SharePoint 2007 introduces the Variations feature, which you can use to create a website hierarchy for content in multiple languages. For example, the site may be where customers from multiple languages can view information about the Company's products and services, or a corporate intranet site where employees live in different regions of the world and need access to information in their primary languages. Although variations do not actually translate the content for you, it starts a workflow that helps you do this work. Basically, you create content in a source language and then provision the content out to other sites, which represent the other required languages. This happens via workflow, which also notifies appropriate users that they are required to perform the translations. Figure 13-4 represents a site hierarchy with support for English and French versions of the website. Besides English and French, Variations can support any other languages, such as Spanish, Japanese, and German. ...