Published:
26 September 2018
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Huge organizations have many people working in the same organization in different regions across the globe having different languages for communication. In general scenario regional language is more in to preference. As internet facilities are now easily available, websites are the most favorable and less expensive equipment for marketing purpose. Websites should be capable enough to provide content suitable to their target audiences across the globe. But maintaining the different sites with different languages is very difficult for content redundancy point of view.
According to Microsoft, many fortune 500 Companies are using SharePoint for public facing sites and as intranet sites to manage their businesses. They have many offices in different regions of the world. These types of company’s needs websites that deliver customized content, to suit different cultures and different markets. It is very tedious and time-consuming task to maintain and manage data with different languages. They have to make sure that data must be redundant. Therefore, Microsoft SharePoint has provided below approaches to manage multi-lingual sites:
- Install different language packs in SharePoint server: We can install different language packs in a SharePoint environment to support more than one language. But this will only affect the site administration pages and user interface but does not affect content created on site.
- Use the variations feature to make publishing content available in different languages on different sites: Different sites will be created for different languages and content will be sync between these sites. Unlike the first option,this feature does not affect the administration pages and user interface, only affects the content.
Today, we will discuss for SharePoint variation features to manage content in multi-lingual sites. Points are insight by the team of SharePoint developers taking into considerations the real-time scenarios faced while the development phases and client requirements.
We can use SharePoint variation feature to support multi-lingual sites in SharePoint server and SharePoint Online. Using Variation feature in SharePoint development, site administrators can simplify the process of maintaining these sites with different languages. It automates the creation, synchronization, and translation of sites, lists, and pages in SharePoint sites.
When the user visits the root site, they are redirected to the appropriate variation site according to language settings in their browser settings. Variations can be utilized only on sites that are built by utilizing one of the Publishing site templates, or on sites for which the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature was initiated.
Scenarios for using variations
We can manage variations to build and design sites, lists, and page content for specific linguistics. For example, the content might be accessible in English and be synced to target variation sites for translation into other languages say for example Arabic, German, French, and Spanish.
We can also use variations to create content for specific locales. For example, the Arabic language might have target variation sites for the following locales: Arabic (Egypt), Arabic (Qatar), Arabic (Saudi Arabia) etc. While SharePoint consulting, this is the general scenario commonly we came across with the clients. The largest part of the content is authored in English (United States) in the general scenario, and the variation feature syncs that available content to the target variation sites.
Content on the French (Canada) and Dutch (Mexico) site are translated into French and Dutch, whereas content for English is edited to account for regional differences in Egypt and Qatar Arabic. Other content that is individual to a specific region is built on the target variation sites for which it is required. In SharePoint 2010, we are using variations to create sites in different mobile devices, or that used different branding. In SharePoint 2016 based application development, variations are used only for multilingual sites. To create sites for different mobile devices in SharePoint 2016, we can use Device Channels. To create sites with different branding, we can use cross-site publishing.
Elements used in Variation features
The variations feature consists of the following elements:
- Variation Root Site: The variation root site is the source site of all the variation. Root site provides the URL for all source and target variation site and landing page URL to redirect in a specific variation site. Note: Variation root site is not the same as site collection root site, but we can set the site collection root site as a root site of variation hierarchy.
- Variation labels: A variation label is an identifier of a new variation site. We can create a variation site by creating/configuring the Variation label. Note: SharePoint Server supports up to 209 variation labels. SharePoint Online
supports up to 50 variation labels. - Variations hierarchy: This is a hierarchy of all the Variations site with all variation label.
- Variation lists: Variation lists are lists where we specifically target variation labels to receive/sync list items.
- Variation pages: Variation pages are the publishing pages that are stored in the Pages library of the source variation site and the target variation sites. Important: Recommended that we do not add non-publishing pages to the Pages library of a site that uses variations. If we do that, the Variations Create Hierarchies Job Definition timer job might fail.
- Variation sites: Variation sites are the sites that are created based on the variation labels. There are two types of variation sites:
- Source variation site:The source variation site is the site where shared content is available and published, and it is the site from where the shared content is synced with target variation sites. There is only one source variation site per one site collection. Once we created a source variation site, it cannot be changed later.
- Target variation sites:The target variation sites receive/synced most of their content from the source variation site. We can add/update new content on a target variation site. However, that content is not synced with other sites and is individual to the site on which it was built.
Let’s start by configuring variation feature in SharePoint server:
Here, I have used SharePoint 2013 enterprise server for illustration purpose.
Variation Feature Prerequisites SharePoint Variation feature requires below prerequisites:.
- Install required language packs on SharePoint server.
- Configure Machine Translation service and make sure it is started in SharePoint Central Administration under “Application Management”.Manage services on server:
Manage service applications:
- Require SharePoint site created using “Publishing” site template or site with “SharePoint Server Publishing feature” features activated.
Configure Variations Settings
To Configure/Setup Variation in SharePoint site follow below settings:
Create Variation Source Label
To create source variations site/label from where the content should be variant to the target site, follow the below steps:
Create Variation Target Label(s)
To create target variations site/label, follow the below steps:
Create Variation Hierarchy
Once we create a Label for source and target, each label should create a variation sub-site based on the scheduled timer job (i.e., Variations Create Hierarchies Job Definition) for the Variation. Click on “Create Hierarchies” link from Variation labels page in site settings that will invoke the timer job “Variations Create Hierarchies Job Definition”. This timer job will get executed based on its schedule.
Once the hierarchies created successfully, “Hierarchy is Created” status on Variation Label page will change to “Yes” and sites are created successfully.
SharePoint 2013 Variation Timer Jobs
SharePoint 2013 Variation feature content synchronization is a unidirectional process, it synchronizes content from a source variation site to one or many target variation sites. To see the Timer Job go to Central administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions. Below are the list of timer jobs involved in variations feature in SharePoint:
- Variations Create Hierarchies Job Definition: Creates all variation sites, lists and pages from the source variation site. It runs hourly.
- Variations Propagate List Items Job Definition: Creates and updates list items on target variation Default, every 15 minutes.
- Variations Propagate Page Job Definition: Creates and updates pages on target variation after approved. Runs every 15 minutes.
- Variations Propagate Sites and List Job Definition: Implements or executes variation sites and lists when the “Create Everywhere” option is enabled. The process executes every 30 minutes.
Above timer jobs are run automatically at above mentioned time interval. If user want to run any Timer Job manually for specific requirements, then user can find above timer jobs from Central administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions. Select “Web Application” from the View as shown in below screenshot.
Select our Web Application from Web Application Dropdown.
Click on the appropriate timer job to run it manually. We can see the Edit Timer Job page, Click on “Run Now” to start the timer job manually.
Variation Logs
During the variation process, there are several timer jobs to execute for the task completion. All activities related to Variation process are logged and collected under Variation logs list to provide details and troubleshooting any variation related issue such as Hierarchy creation, Page propagation, etc. Variation logs are positioned beneath root site collection’s settings page. Site Settings > Site Collection Administration > Variation logs
Test Variation Features
Let’s test Variation feature by Syncing Custom list and Libraries in Variation:
Web Parts behavior with Variation features
Web Parts are synced with pages of variation sites. If “Update Target Page Web Parts” is allowed, web Parts are refreshed only on the target variation site if a page that incorporates that web part is synced to the target variation site. If the web part seems on various target pages on many target variation sites, all instances of the web part are modernized when the page from the source variation site is synchronized to the target variation sites.
For illustration, if a page possesses a Media Web Part, and the web part is configured to point to “Video A” that is stored on a site outside the variations hierarchy when the page is declared on the source variation site, the page is synchronized to all target variation sites. The pages on the target variation sites exhibit “Video A” in the Media Web Part.
If the page on the source variation site is refreshed and the Media Web Part is modified to point to “Video B”, the pages on the target variation sites stretch to point to “Video A” until the page on the source variation site is declared and synchronized to the target variation sites. Also, if readers on the target variation sites do not have permission to view the video file that is stored outside the variations hierarchy, they can’t observe the video.
Limitations
There are few limitations with Variation features in SharePoint Development:
- We can use variation features only with the site(s) created using ‘Publishing site’ or ‘Publishing site with workflow’ templates. It is quite complicated to use feature stapling with OOTB site template for variation sites creation.
- There can be only one root site variation per site collection.
- There is only one way synchronization between the source language and target languages, we can synchronize content from source to target, but we cannot synchronize content from target to source.
- Pages do not get synchronized until they are published. Therefore one version of the page has to be ready in source variation site before the target version of the page can even get translated and worked on.
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