About WCM multi-local site approach

IBM has recently published a very interesting article about how to manage multi-language in WCM (IBM Workplace Web Content Management) and to build multi-local sites : multi-local site

As far as I understand the proposed approach (for the moment) is to provide a sample framework to help customer building their own multi-language strategy, rather than implementing a these features in the product core...probably, because there is not a single way to implement multi-language...That's also my point of view. As this framework is based on the WCM public API, customer can easily customize it to match their specific needs.

I wanted to get more information about the roadmap of this multi-language framework, so I asked some questions to David De Vos. So in this post, I just want to share some of these info.

I asked him if IBM has any plan to include this multi-local framework in a next release of the WCM product (as a "core features"), or will IBM continue to provide it as a separated sample ?
As you might remember (see previous post), we (in my company) also have developped our own framework to support multi-language. It is also based on the WCM public API. So we could choose to replace our framework with the IBM one (to implement a solution more aligned with the IBM solution), but this code migration will require a lot of efforts....So, I'm trying to identify the pros & cons to justify this operation (and using a "core feature" could be a good argument for migrating).

So here is basically what David told me:
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The plan is to start to replace some of the components in the new multi-local framework sample code with WCM core function (that is either the same or better) and that over releases most of the stuff in the whitepaper (it could be everything but IBM would never to commit to that) will become core to some degree...

Using this new multi-local framework will provide the following benefits:
* Allow customers to share custom code developed from it with the community,
* Provide customers with more features (assuming customers custom solution doesn't already do everything the sample code does)
* Allow you to remove parts of the same code with core function once it becomes available, thus leaving you with less code to maintain.
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Another of my question was : regarding the roadmap, could IBM confirms that most of the framework should be merged as core feature in release 6.1 (for Q3 2008) ?
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David explains that:
This new framework merge is an ongoing line item that is unlikely to be complete by 6.1.. David said that he can't provide any more concrete details than that as they aren't simply available for the moment...
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I think that whatever custom approach you could have already implemented in your company, this new multi-local framework for WCM should be studied carefully, because some of the provided features are really interesting...I have to work on these subject in the next month, so I will try to give you more details about this new approach.