Recently we did research through the user interview with multiple of our customers and partners.

We would like to say thank you to everyone who joined, for their time and effort spent as well as a valuable contribution to the research.

The key theme of the discussion was a BluePrinting feature of Tridion Sites product.

BluePrinting is one of the main benefits and unique features of Tridion Sites. However, the term “BluePrinting” is quite broad. During our research on one hand we focused on understanding how different aspects of BluePrinting are used by our customers, on the other hand, we validated a hypothesis based on the current behaviour of the system.

In general, BluePrinting is used for content sharing to reuse it as well as the possibility to localize content on a certain level to adjust it. Either to translate the content to a different language or for other business requirements.

Current system behaviour: when you are localizing content then automatic content updates are not available between parent and localized child item(s). As soon as you are updating an item in a parent publication – your changes are not automatically reflected in localized child publications.

We wanted to validate to which extent this causes a problem for our customers.

Before engaging in the user interviews we’ve thought about a few possible solutions, which we discussed with the participants at the end of the user interview.

One of the approaches, as we call it “pull” is when content is synchronized by a child item from a parent.

Another is a “push” approach, where content is synchronized from parent to child item(s).

During the interview, we discovered that in the majority of cases content synchronization is effectively done using Translation Manager features – push and pull jobs.

Our solution, as we suspected, for the stated problem was found very useful by customers that have similar language pairs and do localization due to different regional organization or business unit needs.

It turned out that the main issue with content synchronization between parent and child is about fields that do not require translation, like component links, images, dates, and numbers.

In case of changes for fields in the parent item, these content updates should be synchronized to child items.

To address this some customers have already implemented extensions, some are achieving this via an internal (manual) process.

Based on all findings in the user research, we discovered that a better solution is to focus on introducing non-localizable fields.  This allows you to configure which field(s) are not allowed to be changed when the item is localized, ensuring that these field values are always in sync with the parent item.

With this in mind, it is important to mention that this community idea is quite popular: https://community.rws.com/ideas/tridion-ideas/i/tridion-sites-ideas/non-localizable-fields

We prioritized the non-localizable fields feature as it is a quick win. We also do consider other improvements to be very valuable, and would like to investigate and plan:

• “push” and “pull” content synchronization approaches
• BluePrinting dashboards
• Other minor improvements like the “Unlocalize All” action

Again thank you for your participation and valuable input. We all much appreciate it and hope to talk to you again someday for other user interviews.