Announced - IBM Lotus Web Content Management Multilingual Solution (MLS)

My IBM colleague, Stuart Crump, alerted me to this new asset yesterday.

The IBM Lotus Web Content Management Multilingual Solution (MLS) offering comprises a set of supported extensions to IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) that make it easier to build, maintain and deliver WCM sites in multiple languages.  The MLS offering also includes a whitepaper, "Multilingual Site Management with Lotus Web Content Management", that describes the framework for managing a multilingual site, the deployment and configuration of the extensions, and examples of their use.

The MLS offering is designed to work specifically in conjunction with IBM Lotus Web Content Management Version 7.0 only.

The set of extensions consist of the following:

• An Authoring Plug-in (aka Custom Fields) to display information about associated language translations;
• A number of Workflow Synchronization Plug-ins (aka Custom Workflow Actions) to automate the creation of translated documents and handle publishing, expiry and delete synchronization of those documents;
• A number of Rendering Plug-ins (aka LRP Context Processor and Servlet JSPs) to enable end-users to see content in the right language and allow switching between languages;
• A Library Copy Portlet to make it easier to deploy new translated versions of existing sites.

Please refer to the included Whitepaper for important capacity planning information (section 'Capacity Planning Advice'). The number of multilingual libraries in combination with the number of concurrent users needs to be considered, and the appropriate capacity planning actions carried out.

It is available in the Lotus Greenhouse here, and there's an active discussion about it on the WCM forum here.

The price ? Oh, as Marie Scott would say, "It's free, free, free" :-)