ACSF + Lift: Managing Multilingual and Global Sites

This is part four of a four part series on Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Lift. We truly live in a global economy and it’s extremely rare to find an enterprise-level organization that doesn’t have a global presence. Managing an omnichannel presence can be challenging in one geography, let alone across the globe. Regional, regulatory, or business subdivision requirements will require different sets of site features and flexibility. Content not only needs to meet the rules and regulations set for your industry by country, but there are also multiple languages to consider. Using a multisite digital experience management platform like Acquia Cloud Site Factory paired with Acquia Lift can help you manage your global presence more efficiently. Acquia Cloud Site Factory allows you to create templates or “starter sites” that can then be tailored around various regional, regulatory, or business sub-division requirements. For example, if you are a pharmaceutical company looking to deploy a number of global sites, you need to factor in that what you can show on your product’s website will differ from country to country, depending on the country’s regulations. In this case, you can create a template for the U.S. that is a different template for say, Europe. You can then spin out your U.S. sites under one template and all of your European sites from the other, allowing all of the sites under both of those themes to be maintained with the same underlying code base for faster updating. Then, by using Acquia Lift, you can update common corporate content across your portfolio of sites and share local content with the central repository, which allows you to keep a record of all content across the network. With multilingual entity translation support, after you translate a piece of a content from say, English to French, the French version can be linked to the English version and all other versions of that content. All content from your network of sites can now be available to distribute, update, and reuse globally. Content is what differentiates your brand from your competitors, and what keeps your customers coming back. But how you manage content differs from how you manage your sites globally. Content needs to stay fresh, it needs to be relevant to your audience, and it needs to be useful, interesting and/or informative. It also needs to follow specific regional regulations depending on where that content will live. The only way to efficiently manage content across a global network of sites is by automating the process. Content pulled into a repository like Acquia Lift’s content hub makes it easier to search for, manage, personalize and syndicate across the appropriate sites and channels, reducing the previously manual tasks of updating or searching for content site by site.