Danish Hussain

When you work with multi lingual sites implemented using Share point variation features you may find that whenever you try to update page in your source site it will automatically published to all variation labels and will overwrite your translated content in other sites. e.g. You have bilingual site with English and Spanish. Where we consider english as a src site. When you create a new page in English and Publish this page a new page in draft status with English content will be created in Spanish Site. Translator will translate content and publish page created in Spanish Site. Suppose you find a spelling mistake and update content in English site. Now when you go to spanish site using system administrator you will noticed that the page will be in draft status with Latest English content i.e. Translator will now have to translate the whole page instead of fixing the small issue.In order to resolve this issues you need to do following changes in your varaition settings. Open site using...

Sharepoint system will not provide any alert or notification to user if any thing crashes in varaition system. e.g. If any issue occurs it will not copy pages but you will be noticed that later when you will find broken links on your site. It is recomended that administrator checks logs after publishing new contents to see if everything working as per expectation. Varaition logs can be location in site settings at your top level site. If you think you are getting unexpected behaviour and your logs are not showing any useful information you may further investigate logs in "hive 12" i.e. "[Program Files]\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12". You may check status of your scheduled job for locating any issues in variation. If you found that issue is due to execution of your job restart Windows sharepoint timer service using services console "services.msc" to fix issue.

While working with MOSS varaitions you may noticed that you will not find any mechnasim for switchin youg language i.e Language selection will be missing on you page. This is bacuse the language selection is disabled by default. For enabling language selection you need uncomment a line in VariationsLabelMenu.ascx mnually. It can be located at "[Program Files]\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\" folder. you have to uncomment line for language selection in "VariationsLabelMenu.ascx" to enable language selection on your MOSS site

Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) provides multiplingual functionalities using its language pakages and variations. When proper language packages are installed you can use power of variation to build multiligual side. The way variation is designed, It provide you alot but you still need to think on several points and issues while designing your site structure using MOSS Varaition. Variation simply copy pages from one site to another and provide you functionality to maintain two copies of sites but sharepoint list and other structures remains in master site and will give you un anticipated behaviour. When you create variation label it will create sites with in your varaition root with selected local and sharepoint will set culture of site. Following are the problem that you may need to think on while woking with mutlilingual sites that provides more then content publishing. 1. Deployment of custom workflows. Workflows associated with lists in sharepoint, when you design any custom...