As I live in Belgium, coping with multilingual scenarios is pretty much a daily routine. Here we have 2 languages that are widely spoken, being Dutch and French. The consequence is that a lot of companies employ people that speak different languages.In most of those companies, English is the language for IT systems, so that's pretty easy to handle with. Others want to provide the user all the functionality of a MOSS 2007 environment in the user's own language.
This post is about the combination of languages and mysites, which provides two possibilities:
- All the mysites are in the same language
- The mysite is in the language of the user
Let's go over both options:
1. All the mysites are in the same language
This one is easy. When configuring the Shared Services Provider, a Mysite Provisioning Site will be created. This will be done in the installation language of you server install. Meaning, if your Central Administration is in English, the Mysite Provisioning Site will be in English. Hence, all your mysites will be in English.
If you want to change this to another language, just perform following steps:
- Install the Server Language Pack of the language you require...
- Go to Central Administration >> Application Management >> Delete Site Collection
Delete the Mysite Provisioning Site Collection
- Go to Central Administration >> Application Management >> Create Site Collection
Create a new Mysite Provisioning Site Collection selecting the wanted language (with the same name and managed path as the deleted one)
That's it, from now on, all your mysites will be in the language you desire...
2. The mysite is in the language of the user
Perform following steps:
- Install all the Server Language Packs required (here in Belgium, this would be: Dutch, French and German)
- Go to the Shared Services Administration site, to MySite Settings
- Check the box for "Allow user to choose the language of their personal site" and click OK
When a user creates is mysite, he will be presented a dropdown box, with all the possible languages.
Watch out though, once created, a site cannot switch languages anymore...
Keep on DJ-ing
Tom