Regional Site with locale overlay or individual countries advice needed

[EggBoy]

We have a requirement to have visitors identify/confirm what specific country they are in, to drive eComm pricing and regulatory requirements to only show certain content in certain countries.

That encompasses about 120 countries.

For the vast majority, basically 100 countries, the only differences between them are several content fragments that contain local contact information. The rest of the differences we plan to use Target for.

So, the question is:

Do we need a live copy for each and every country, or should be have, say, a Latin America/ES regional site, and then have a 'locale cookie' that stores either the user preference for their specific country (Paraguay, Ecuador etc.) or what country Akamai places them in?

If we go live copy, that seems very inefficient and more unwieldy than having around 21 country or region nodes vs. about 120.

What have others seen/done around this? Is having a mix of regional sites that we overlay with locale logic a recommended way to set this up?

NOTE: we will be launching this year, with AEM 6.3, MSM, Assets, Target Premium.

Many many thanks in advance for any advice or observations!

Eugene

[kautuk_sahni]

Checking this with the product management.

-Kautuk

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

so if I understand you right, you are still in the design and architecture phase, are you?

I hesitate to make any recommendations here. Because you are at a very sensitive point here, as you work on the content architecture. The content architecture is always the result of many requirements and it's rarely dominated by a single requirement (although there are cases, where it's the case); and as this content architecture itself has consequences to many other areas of your project and into daily operation, it should be really carefully designed.  I would recommend to discuss this topic in depth with your system integrator; additionally Adobe Customer Solution (a.k.a. Adobe Consulting) is happy to support you here as well.

To add some useful information to this: Depending on the change ratio of the content MSM livecopies are not a bad idea per se. You will need to deliver the same content via multiple domain names, so either you rewrite that on dispatcher (or using /etc/map) and deliver it this "identical" content from the same repo page. That will probably work, but then you need to build logic into your components to handle all aspects which are country specific. Or do it Adobe Target.

If you have a live copy for each country, the situation will change a bit, as you can change each page and your components can be simpler. Also you have the option to make "local" changes also in AEM and not only using Target.

Consider additional topics:

* SEO (the "localized" content is loaded via javascript and not available in the HTML directly)

* Access control on authoring?

* Is this a future proof approach? If you are doing the localization in Target, your authors will work on 2 systems. Is this the way you want to go?

Jörg

[EggBoy]

Hello Jörg, and thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Yes, we are in the final throes of the design/architect phase in a perhaps too agile process :-)

The driving business requirements would be:

1. efficiency of updating sites that share most content (Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Columbia share the same LA/ES content, and  Germany, Austria (I suspect, based on your name, you find this painful..sorry ...:-), CH/DE, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg share the same German content.............. in the case of Spanish, we use the same translations for Euro and South America, and in South America, we will have a separate Argentina /ES site as we have local marketing people on the ground there
2. Need to ID these different countries as we have different pricing per country for eCommerce
3. might not show certain products in certain countries as some of our products are regulated as medical devices

We hope to use Content Fragments to centrally manage contact/distributor info per country. so we can manage that separately...then have logic on the contact page to show the correct CF or CF variation based on the 'locale'.

For Target, we participated in the recent closed Beta for Experience Fragments and Target...so HOPE to manage most Target content in AEM (fingers crossed.)

It's an interesting thought exersize that will be decided this or next week...once we do I will update this thread with what we did and why.

Thank you again!

Eugene

[Jörg_Hoh]

Hi Eugene,

Ok, I understand.

If you use identical content (that means no copies and not using MSM) for different countries, you are tied to that. If you need to make a change to German content (and only German content), you need to find out how you can do it in the most efficient way. With ContentFragment you can do a lot, but I don't know if they are the best way to make such changes (I haven't though through all the cases ...).

I am not the biggest fan of the MSM, but it has been really built for such a usecase. It works very well if you most of the content is just inherited down and if inheritance is broken rarely. In that case you have all the benefits of having dedicated content per country/locale with the ability to change it at will, plus the reduced overhead for content maintenance if you don't break it. Of course the complexity of the solution is a bit higher, but if you implement that approach using CF, Target and other ways it's also complex. Maybe even more complex from an authoring point of view.

But that's my impression from an outside to your discussion. I am looking forward to the result of your discussion.

regards,

Jörg