The major purpose of this release is to introduce a change in machine translation of the user interface. Previous versions of PointFire 365 used the SharePoint Online Machine Translation Service. Microsoft is deprecating this service at the beginning of August 2022. This release replaces it with the Azure Translator API. This will require entering an Azure Translator API key. The free tier of this service is often sufficient. If you are legally required to use a particular Azure region, contact us to determine what region code to use, otherwise use "Global", meaning closest available datacenter. You can find or create your Azure Translator service here:

https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_Azure_ProjectOxford/CognitiveServicesHub/~/TextTranslation

This is a supported official release. It can be used for production. It must be installed by July 31, 2022 to prevent an issue that will be caused by a Microsoft change scheduled for early August.

If you were using an earlier supported release, the upgrade requires no change to data or licenses, however you must press the "Activate" button on each site after upgrade or use the ActivateApp script. Some JavaScript from the previous version will remain cached until the next session unless you press Ctrl-F5 or equivalent on your browser.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Starting in March 2022, all of our PowerShell scripts have switched from the legacy SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline module, which stopped being maintained in 2020, to the PnP.PowerShell module.

The PF365 installation script will uninstall the old module and install the new one on the workstation if that has not already been done. If no one has yet run the command "Register-PnPManagementShellAccess", you must get a global admin to consent for the Tenant. This only has to be done once for the entire tenant.

Details here

https://pnp.github.io/powershell/cmdlets/Register-PnPManagementShellAccess.html

New and Changed Features

• For MUI step 2, use Azure Translator API if it is configured
• New script SetAzureTranslationProperty.ps1 to set the Azure Translator API key and optional region
• "Activate" scripts will let you select languages the first time a site is activated, but keep languages the same when re-activating.
• Turn off SharePoint Multilingual Page Publishing feature at first activation of PointFire 365, so that users are not confused, preserving data
• Migrate existing page library items from Multilingual Page Publishing to PointFire 365 when the library is made multilingual.

Resolved Issues

• Constant refresh issues on list items for users set to certain languages

PointFire makes SharePoint truly multilingual and lets your users collaborate in their language.  Two different users going to the same page on the same site will each see it almost entirely in their language, both UI and content, without using Variations.

To get your copy, go to http://community.icefire.ca/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/Index/1/pointfire-installation-packages and log in or create an account.

The fully-featured trial version can be downloaded for free and can be used for development and testing, with some pre-sale support.