SharePoint Site Variations

SharePoint Site Variations

The variations feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps creating multilingual site hierarchy, which makes content available by copying content from the source variation site to each target variation site in the hierarchy.

After installing the Hebrew Language Pack, I want to create site variation hierarchy with two sites:

• English site (Source)
• Hebrew site (Target)

Use the following steps to create SharePoint site variations:

• Create New Web Application
• Create Site Variation
• Create Variation Labels

Create New Web Application

In the SharePoint Central Administration page, select Application Management, and then select “Create or extend Web application” link.

In the Create or Extend Web Application page, enter the user name and password, and click OK.

In the Application Created page press on Create Site Collection link.

In the Create Site Collection, select title, URL and site template. Provide also user name and press OK.

Verify your site collection was successfully created in the following URL:

http://myhost:port/sites/MySiteCollection

Create Site Variation

Press on “Set up multilingual support” link to create variation home. Type slash (‘/’) to indicate the top-level Web site of the site collection and press OK.

To go to variation in the menu, go to Modify All site settings, and then select variations.

Create Variation Labels

A variation label is an identifier that is used to name and configure a new variation site in the variation hierarchy. You can select only one variation label as the source, which represents the main site where content enters the system. The corresponding variation labels are the target labels, representing the sites to which content is copied.

Select variation label, set label name, display name, site template language and locale for both the English site and the Hebrew site.

In addition, for the English site, creates it as the source hierarchy.

Press on “Create Hierarchies” operation and go to the site collection home page, this is the result I get:

Check the Result

If you put in the browser the following URL: http://myhost:port/sites/MySiteCollection

You will redirected to the appropriate variation (English / Hebrew) according to the definition of the default language preferences in your browser:

If you add and publish a new page in the English site, it will duplicated to the other sites in the hierarchy.