SharePoint provides poor multilingual support. I've been familiarizing myself with SharePoint's multilingual support. According to the marketing and product documentation, I should be able to use something called variations to have SP manage multiple versions of a single site.

However, surprise-surprise, it turns out that variations are half-baked and require a fair amount of heavy lifting to get them to work properly. How much work? Well, an Ottawa-based company has a developed SharePoint add-in called PointFire 2007 that provides multilingual UI and content management for SharePoint 2007. Cost? $4000 per server.

If the product costs $4000, you can be sure that it would cost us a lot more to develop the same thing from scratch. And this for functionality that SP is supposed to deliver out of the box.

There are two things we are looking to SharePoint for: online collaboration spaces and web publishing. For collaboration spaces, I would like to be able to have the UI in two languages, but the document libraries, discussion boards, and other content should remain in whatever language the user decides to post their content in. Still not sure I can actually do this in SP, that is, to have the UI toggle around one set of content objects. More research required there.

For the web content management, however, we need to have a web site mirrored in two languages. Variations were key to automating this, and it looks like they are not reliable enough to use. That leaves me with the option of manually managing two versions of our site (ex www.cfc-fcc.ca and francais.cfc-fcc.ca) and finding someway at least to toggle between the two. In other words, I really wouldn't be using any of SPs localization functionality.

Of course, the loss of another of feature makes it that much harder to live with SharePoint's other limitations. Hopefully with a bit more digging and work I'll be able to figure out how to make the most of this less-then-ideal situation.