A "lessons learned" deep dive from recent project experience where Variations were enabled to support the multilingual requirements of an Internet Portal. This presentation discusses configuration, patches, replication issues, performance, custom code, and testing. The majority of the material will be from real world experience and the school of hard knocks!

1. SpringPoint Technologies, LLC www.myspringpoint.com 1 SharePoint Publishing Sites with Variations (Multi-Lingual) David McCollough

2. Architecture SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 2

3. Introduction SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 3 Enabling SharePoint Variations on a Publishing Portal allows you to (somewhat) easily create a web application where you can have content pages translated into other languages. Variations can also be used to provide alternate pages for mobile devices.

4. Planning SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 4 Supporting multiple languages should be considered very early in your design process. Variations effects all aspects of a publishing portal including site structure, lists, master pages, page layouts, document libraries, basically everything.

5. Implementation SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 5 A key factor in successfully implementing variations is the patch level of the SharePoint Farm. The Minimum level that should be used is 12.0.0.6318. This is MOSS 2007 SP1 plus the infrastructure updates for both WSS 3.0 (KB 951695) and MOSS 2007 (KB 951297).

6. Implementation SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 6 If you have Home as your root site, when you turn on variations it will become /EN/Home Any code that you might be using to create lists, page instances, site structure will need to be variation aware. Page content is not translated. Variation labels MUST match the culture codes in order for page propagation to work.

7. SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 7

8. Implementation SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 8 Once variations are turned on, you can’t turn them off.

9. Implementation SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 9

10. Implementation SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 10

11. Performance SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 11 Performance, Creating the site hierarchies for the target sites is VERY resource intensive and time consuming. It is recommended that you create only one target site at a time. You will experience performance problems using variations in a virtual environment, unless that virtual environment very closely mimics physical hardware. Depending on site size, page propagation times will vary.

12. Lessons Learned SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 12 Hidden pages in a pages gallery will be propagated to the target web sites, but they will not be hidden in the target web sites. Document libraries are not propagated to the target web sites. If you have a page hidden in the current navigation it will not be hidden in the target web sites.

13. Lessons Learned SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 13 Changing the default welcome page requires you to reset it on the target sites. Source variation lists are not propagated to target sites. Only page galleries will be propagated and the pages will be in draft mode.

14. Lessons Learned SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 14 Using a custom master page on the source site requires you to reset the master page on the target sites. Images in the source variation are not propagated to the target sites. Content Types must match between page gallery’s in both the source and target sites.

15. Sample Code SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 15 Retrieve all variation labels and iterate over // Grab all of the variations. ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels; foreach (VariationLabelvlinvariationLabels) { using (SPWebwebSite = siteCollection.OpenWeb("/" + vl.Title + "/AboutUs")) { //List Creation code omitted … } }

16. Sample Code SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 16 Retrieve the source (default) variation ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels; foreach (VariationLabelvlinvariationLabels) { if (vl.IsSource) { returnvl; } }

17. Sample Code SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 17 Retrieve relative url for current variation stringcurrentUrl = SPContext.Current.Web.Url; ReadOnlyCollection<VariationLabel> variationLabels = Variations.Current.UserAccessibleLabels; foreach (VariationLabelvlinvariationLabels) { if (currentUrl.StartsWith(vl.TopWebUrl, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)) { variationUrl = "/" + vl.Title; break; } }

18. Utilities SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 18 If you find that variations just isn’t working as you would expect there is a possibility that the relationships list has become corrupt. Tim Dobrinski has created a variations editor utility to help fix the relationships list. You can download it from this url: http://tinyurl.com/dbclsp.

19. SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 19 Q/A

20. Contact Info SpringPoint Technologies, LLC 20 Email: dmccollough@mySpingPoint.com Blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/DavidMcCollough/ Company: www.MySpringPoint.com