Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/37773
LEVERAGING SHAREPOINT TO BUILD YOUR FIRM’S WEBSITE The content authors can choose to translate the news story, which may go through its own approval process, and then publish the translated news item. They may also decide that the news story is not relevant to their locale and not publish it, or they may choose to publish the content without translation. Let’s say a U.K. author decides to publish the content as-is, and a French author chooses to translate and publish the news story in French. Now imagine that sometime after initial publication, the U.S. author notices a typo in the published version of the news story. He corrects the typo and republishes the updated story. The U.K. and French authors are notified that there has been an update to the news item, which now sits in their queues as a minor revision to the existing news item. Both authors are able to view a red-lined version of the previous English content as compared to the updated English content. Both authors notice that the change was a minor correction that did not otherwise change the meaning of the news story. In this case, the U.K. author again chooses to publish the updated content as-is to correct the typo on the U.K. site while the French author chooses to ignore the content update as it has no impact on the already translated French version of the content. When users access your public website, SharePoint will look to their browsers’ accepted language to determine which site variation they should see. If their browser setting matches a site variation’s locale, they will be sent to the appropriate site; otherwise, if no match is found they will be defaulted to the source site. For example, if someone accesses your site with their browser language set to “French” then SharePoint will automatically direct them to the French site variation if it exists; and if not, they will be sent to your primary site. SharePoint also provides a dropdown list of available sites which can be used to switch to a specific site variation. In addition, SharePoint supports right-to- left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew. By building right-to-left master pages, both the text on the page and the placement of Web parts will flip accordingly when a right-to-left language is detected from the browser. Separate from the variations features, we are often asked about customizing SharePoint to use IP geo-location to automatically direct users to the appropriate site. This is certainly feasible; however, we generally recommend against this practice as possibly being “too clever” as a basis for language detection. Geo-location can have its place, such as driving locally relevant content to the forefront, but it should not be relied upon for language detection. There are several scenarios where IP geo-location breaks down and can confuse users as to why they were shown content in a particular language. Consider that organizations that route corporate Internet traffic across an entire region through a single gateway would give misleading IP information; business travelers accessing your website outside of their home countries would be directed to languages they are unable to read, or in countries where multiple “official” languages are used, such as Switzerland. Geo- location alone cannot tell you which language to use. For these reasons, we recommend browser language detection as a more reliable indicator of preferred language, combined with the ability to easily and intuitively switch to alternative languages on your website. www.iltanet.org Portal Platforms 43