One of my customers has a large, multi-lingual site built on SharePoint 2007. They're looking to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and brought me some specific questions they wanted answered. I worked with the SharePoint product team to get the answers back, and figured this info was valuable enough to post up for anyone else considering the move. Some of the question are more a statement (complaint) rather than a question. :)
Publishing/Authoring:
Q: Specific to variations, when a page from the variation site is published, it gets a new version number e.g. 3.0. By going into the authoring environment, I can see this published page by navigating to it directly. When I go to the root site, and publish a new version of that page, it creates a draft in my variation site (3.1) and now when I go to the authoring site, I can only see the draft version. There is no easy way to look at the published page in the authoring environment to see the differences.
A: Check out this blog post on how to view source page changes from the target variation site.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/05/05/view-changes-makes-in-browser-content-localization-easier.aspx
This article covers version history/management and is also helpful here. This is how you would view local changes on your target (e.g. translated version 3.2 vs. translated version 3.0).
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/view-the-version-history-of-an-item-or-file-in-a-sharepoint-list-or-library-HA101853104.aspx?CTT=1
Q: You cannot publish multiple pages on the root or variation sites. Also, we would like to see functionality that would allow a user to approve multiple variation sites at the same time.
A: You cannot bulk publish through the UI; however, you can publish multiple pages using the OM. Variations relies on an event receiver that is fired asynchronously, so after the last item in a batch of bulk-published is approved, you should Sleep for a moment to ensure that the event receiver fires.
Q: Lists do not propagate as part of variations UNLESS you write custom workflows to do this. This is not good from an upgrade or maintenance perspective.
A: Lists remain unsupported by the Variations feature in SharePoint 2010. Variations operate only on pages and, optionally, resources embedded in the page (e.g. images).
Q: Are there any solutions for Vanity URLs in MOSS 2007, and are we addressing this in 2010?
A: Conceivably, you could accomplish this using the IIS Rewrite module
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
However, for performance reasons (mainly), URL rewriting is not supported.
Q: When anonymous access is enabled, server performance degrades, we believe this is due to the fact that some of this functionality does not work if caching is turned on
A: You can configure a separate cache profile for anonymous users. I suggest referring to the Capacity Management Resource center.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff601870.aspx
Here’s a Web Content Management-specific white paper. There’s a section on anonymous vs. authenticated: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fd1eac86-ad47-4865-9378-80040d08ac55
Q: Blogs – do not work in a publishing environment, even after following the workaround provided on the blog sites.
A: Do you mean the content deployment publishing environment? Blogs can be content deployed in SharePoint 2010.
Q: Localization of the CQWP
A: I don’t have specific resources on this. You may want to consult this white paper:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262942(office.12).aspx
which has a section on custom Web Parts.
The localizability of the CQWP depends on what you are querying. If it’s a Pages Library and you’re using Variations, you can query the library of a particular language. However, lists are not copied by Variations, so you might need to perform customizations to present localized CQWPs in that case.
Q: Issues with CSS and Telerik Editor – why doesn’t MSFT offer more effective content editing tools within the application?
A: SharePoint 2010 features a wide range of improvements to the Rich Text Editor (RTE) to improve the content authoring/editing experience. Check out this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2010/04/09/web-authoring-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx
Regarding Web parts:
Q: In SharePoint 2007, webparts do not participate in versioning. Hence if a webpart is changed on a minor version, it will automatically change on the published version. (This is a bit different then what is stated above).
A: In SharePoint 2010, webparts do participate in versioning, hence if a webpart is changed on a minor version, it will only change the minor version, and only when the page is published will the published page have the new webpart changes.
As far as variations goes, web parts should precisely follow that model as well, i.e. draft versions of pages should see the draft version of the web part, and that should become the published version when the page gets published.
Regarding Content Deployment:
Q: Does SharePoint 2010 allow you to add attachments to list items without breaking CD?
A: Yes, deploying sites that contain attachments to list items works fine.
Q: Can calculated fields be used in 2010 without breaking CD?
A: Yes, there no issues that we are aware of regarding deploying calculated fields. We used to have some issues in the past but they are fixed in SP 2010 and in the CUs from the last year.
Q: In SharePoint 2010, when using Content Query WP, do variations work consistently when querying for a particular label, (i.e. can query in other languages besides English)?
A: Yes, variations should work fine here