Once global sites are up, the work of maintaining and managing them has only begun.
Ongoing management can be the toughest part of a global Web strategy, experts say.
That's because e-commerce managers must be able to selectively update and translate content globally on a nearly continuous basis. A new group of software and services vendors has developed to address these concerns and build translation workflow and automation tools for multilingual Web sites. Interwoven Inc. The multilingual Web site management software can work especially well for global sites with central management, said Lycos' Haag. That's why Lycos began using Idiom's WorldServer software for the eight sites in Latin America that the company manages on its own. The company's joint ventures are also considering whether to replace proprietary management systems with Idiom.