SharePoint 2010 Language Pack – How to install & be aware of their limits

Hello @all,

last time I've search a long time for SharePoint 2010 language packs. Now I've found the public URLs:

WSSv4 / Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Language Pack Download
Office Server 2010 Language Pack Download

It’s also important to follow the installation instructions:

Deploy language packs (SharePoint Foundation 2010)

Deploy language packs (SharePoint Server 2010)

Please be aware that language packs still create some limitation in for your SharePoint installation on SharePoint 2010. It’s the same limit like in SharePoint 2007. So it’s not too much that has changed. Let me try to summaries them:

  • You cannot change an existing site, site collection, or Web page from one language to another by applying different language-specific site templates. After you use a language-specific site template for a site or a site collection, the site or site collection will always display content in the language of the original site template. Inside the object model you can see the SPWeb-Object with their LCID (language template id).
  • If you are uninstalling SharePoint Foundation 2010, you must uninstall all language packs before you uninstall SharePoint Foundation 2010.
  • Language packs are not bundled into multilingual installation packages. You must install a specific language pack for each language that you want to support. Also, language packs must be installed on each Web server to ensure that each Web server can render content in the specified language.
  • You cannot remove the language pack for the version of SharePoint Foundation 2010 that you have installed on the server. For example, if you are running the Japanese version of SharePoint Foundation 2010, you cannot uninstall the Japanese language support for SharePoint Foundation 2010.
  • Installing Office SharePoint server 2010 with language pack requires: WSSv4 language pack and Office Server 2010 Language Pack [Update 31.03.2011: this statement is not everytime correct. Office Server LP2010 should include WSSv4 LP files, but on some cases i found a kind of installation were not all files exist... in this case i've installed WSSv4 LP and Office Server LP 2010 on one machine. it solve the problem and no side effect exist :-) ]
  • Every time install first ALL binaries before starting psconfig / Configuration Wizard to add the references into the Farm configuration.

 

Note:
Please be aware that an upgrade of SharePoint 2007 to 2010 increase the limits for your upgrade like these above. Please think one moment about Inplace upgrade including language packs. After an upgrade you need to do a uninstall action of MOSS 2007 and language packs of 2007, but we still have this rule: “You cannot remove the language pack” –> this means: we will do a workaround this like: add a blank new server with 2010 installation (including 2010 language packs) into the upgraded farm and remove the inplace upgrade server from your farm.)

I hope this help.

Regards

Patrick