Design considerations for planning variations sites

We recently published an article that describes important design considerations for implementing variations with publishing sites. The article, Variations design considerations (SharePoint Server 2010), was written by Steve Walker on the Microsoft SharePoint Customer Advisory Team. Steve was formerly a Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services working with many of our largest customers implementing SharePoint solutions for Internet facing scenarios. In the article, Steve encourages readers to carefully consider the impact that storing large amounts of binary data such as documents and images in the content database will have on performance, particularly if content deployment is used. He also explains the difference between the Reference existing resources and Copy the resources options when configuring variation settings, and gives general guidelines for when to use each option. Steve describes three different design scenarios, for small, medium and large sites, and gives examples of how using the Reference existing resources and Copy the resources options could potentially affect the size of the content database, depending on which option is selected.

Read the full article at Variations design considerations (SharePoint Server 2010).

I want to thank Steve for allowing us to publish this article. As always, we love to hear your feedback about our content. Please feel free to add comments to this blog post, or to the article, or send mail to itspdocs@microsoft.com.

Cern McAtee
Technical Writer
SharePoint IT Pro content publishing