Variations available in Office 365 - but not for Public Websites

As I mentioned in a prior post there is a matrix available on Technet now that has details of which service sits with what Cloud offering. So to see what features are included with which Office 365 subscription I can refer you here.

Due to a discussion I was having online recently about Variations (that topic I used to blog about a lot) I decided to comb through the SharePoint Online Service Description to see which Office 365 subscriptions Variations are now available in. I've detailed this below and you can see the feature is pretty widely available. One problem however, I noticed a little comment buried away in the feature notes that states 'Variations is not available for Office 365 public websites'. *Sigh*

These are the little surprises that tend to annoy organisations. You may well do your research, see that Variations are available for example with the E3 Office 365 subscription, and decide that's the home for your new multi-lingual public website. However once you'd already committed some resources to a pilot project to unearth the possibilities you'd find this hidden clause about a lack of support for variations in Public Websites. Your Cloud based multilingual site isn't going to be using Variations after all it seems. :/ I'm a little disappointed by this gap in the offering and I hope the feature will get extended to be available for the public site. After all, Variations have been used on Internet facing SharePoint sites since they were introduced in MOSS 2007. (It's true! Glu.com was built on MOSS Variations back then...)

I include an extract from the lines in the SharePoint Online Service Description below. Beware however this is true at time of writing and could change, so double check on the link to the actual Technet page above!!

Office 365 (Variations is not available for Office 365 public websites)

SharePoint Online (SharePoint Online individual service plans do not include other Office 365 services, such as Microsoft Exchange Online or Microsoft Lync Online.)

On-Premises