I attended Spencer Harbar’s session this morning which was focused on the options available for implementing multi-lingual sites in SharePoint 2010.  In MOSS 2007, variations were difficult to use and were detrimental to the performance of web apps since the process of propagating site content between variations ran within the W3WP.exe process belonging to the web app.

The following were highlighted as some of the performance improvements in the 2010 release:

• Reliability – All operations now run in the timer service rather than in process
• Manageability and recoverability – ‘fix up tool’ provided to help manage the timer jobs
• Significant memory usage improvements
• Pause and resume timer job support

Some best practices were also presented in relation to planning for multi-lingual sites:

• If required, plan to implement variations right from the start – implementing later is extremely difficult and architecturally unsound
• Storage design needs to follow SQL Server best practices
• Navigation needs to be designed to that it works well on all variation sites – for instance some menu labels may be too long in some of the variation languages
• Plan what redirection logic will be used – the default behaviour is to change the language based on the locale of the user’s browser, but this can be changed to allow the user to select the language
• Plan for translation of user content – this is still a manual process and is a large overhead for an organisation
• Never use external redirection of any kind such as in IIS or with reverse proxy since this will interfere with the variation redirection functionality

One of the main developments in SharePoint 2010 is the provision of the Mulit-lingual User Interface (MUI).  This now allows a site to have alternate languages (based on the language packs installed).  The site settings give the site owner to decide which alternate languages should be available for selection on the site.  When this is enabled, a language selector becomes available in the user menu at the top of the site.  This provides multi-lingual chrome on the site as well as translating site menus and site settings pages.

This option is also available in the Central Administration site, allowing users to change the language of the site on the fly.

Multi-lingual sites are also aided in 2010 by the ability to create multi-lingual metadata terms within the term store so that metadata column names and options are provided in the appropriate language automatically.

The new enhancements definitely make the provision of multi-lingual sites more mangeable and a lot more performant, but the implementation of variation sites needs to be well planned to function correctly.

 The logical architecture of Sharepoint 2010 has changed significantly from MOSS 2007.  From the session I attended yesterday at SPC09 the key improvements were highlighted as follows:

• Flexible deployment model
  • Pick which services in which environment
• Improved security model
  • Claims based authorisation
  • Cross-farm communication via web services
• Simplified administration model
  • Managed via central admin and PowerShell
• Service isolation
  • Each service app uses separate database and optionally different app poll
  • Support for multiple service applications for a service with different accounts and databases
• Multi-Tenancy
  • Some service apps can be partitioned to handle multiple tenants

Also mentioned in the session was the fact that Microsoft have released a set of technical diagrams and models relating to planning logical and physical architectures in SharePoint 2010 and upgrading from MOSS 2007.

Here’s a few videos on Office 2010 covering the following:

• Word 2010
• Excel® 2010
• PowerPoint® 2010
• Outlook® 2010
• OneNote® 2010
• Publisher 2010
• Access® 2010
• InfoPath® 2010
• Office Communicator 2007 R2
• SharePoint Workspace 2010
• Visio® 2010
• Office Web Apps
• Office Mobile

I’m particularly interested in the Office Web Apps as these seem to be a competitor to Google Docs and I’m keen to see how these fit in with SharePoint 2010. I love the video of this series – Monica Mendoza has been gallivanting around the globe using Office Web Apps to best effect, but she cleverly tells us ‘I wouldn’t give up the full capabilities of my Office Applications on my PC, but isn’t it great to know you can access your office files from anywhere?’.

Well I’m not sure where they see Office Web Apps being used, but I do think a lot of organisations would be more than happy with having thin client Office installed. I wonder if this is only available with a  purchased office install, or whether they intend to place it on the cloud?

As for the others, SharePoint Workspace 2010 is basically Groove repackaged. Outlook 2010 has a handy conversations feature whereby related conversations are grouped together. You can select a conversation and opt out of future responses and Outlook will automatically file them in the recycle bin. Could be useful in escaping the dreaded ‘added to the cc list by accident’ but also could be the cause of some problems when you make a mistake and bin a conversation that turns out to be relevant.

Word has fancy 3d text effects now, as well as the ability to collaborate on a document in real-time with others. I’m looking forward to seeing that in action.

All apps (I think) have what’s called ‘backstage’. Backstage is basically where you do all the mundane document tasks, like print, send as email and set permissions. I like the ‘stage’ analogy as it separates the tasks well and gives emphasis to the fact that your document is ‘out there, being viewed by others’.