Context

Let’s take an example of a hardware business ABC having presence all over North American continent with United States as it central office. ABC sells it hardware through different brand names. ABC procured AEM license and wants to set up a website leveraging Multi Site Manager (MSM) feature.

• ABC multi-brand, multi-regional and multi-lingual presence.
• Content centrally authored at United States (us) / English (en).
• Regional / Language variations constitute 80% of content from us/en.
• Regional sites may have certain hardware product pages which are absent in US site.
• ABC engages 3rd parties for translation services.
• Changes in language variations within a region managed by regional team.

Business requirements

• Ability to “roll out” centrally authored content from US/English to all other regional and language variations.
• Regional authoring team shall have the ability to tweak the content and add additional pages if required.
• Ability to push content selectively from US/English.
• Need governance process in place for publishing changes from regional teams.
• Regional teams shall have the ability to change only their regional sites.
• Ability to re-use content across brands.
• Translation to be done only once per language for every change.

Solution – Content distribution view

• Language masters are unpublished pages for all languages accessible only by power author to avoid translating the same content multiple times.
• Language masters is set as a blueprint and all other brands and regional sites are the sites created from the blueprint.
• US/EN is the source of content with Master/EN as its live copy. Live copy has synchronize (or modify) event as trigger and follow the standard live sync roll out config.
• Master/EN to other master sites are managed through language copy translation workflow.
• Push to brand and regional sites from blueprint managed through the MSM blueprint center with trigger as “roll out” and follow standard live sync roll out config.

Site structure

Design Summary

• Ability to “roll out” centrally authored content from US/English to all other regional and language variations. [Solution] Leveraged Multi-Site Management (MSM) feature to distribute content from US/EN for regions.
• Regional authoring team shall have the ability to tweak the content and add additional pages if required. [Solution] Regional sites are made as MSM live copies. They permit cancelling the inheritance and changing the content.
• Ability to push content selectively from US/English. [Solution] Leveraged MSM blueprint center to “roll out” content to desired sites.
• Need governance process in place for publishing changes from regional teams. [Solution] Publishing workflow should take care of this.
• Regional teams shall have the ability to change only their regional sites. [Solution] To be managed by ACL. 
• Ability to re-use content across brands. [Solution] Site structure allow this.
• Translation to be done only once per language for every change. [Solution] Usage of language masters does this.