We're working on a public-facing site that must be localized to support 70~100 languages.
Some say that you don't really want to have more than 50 variation labels in SharePoint. I can't find any backing material anywhere on the web about this.
2 Questions:
Regards,
Peter
Answer to number one, no, not in my experience thus far.
Info that doesn't directly answer Number 2 but may still be helpful, this is a listing of "soft limits" on various aspects of Sharepoint Services I didn't see a reference to variation labels, but there is a good amount of info there related to how much it can handle before you should see performance degradation
According to TechNet Article Plan Variationsthere is a limit of 50 varitions. However using SharePoint 2007 SP2 I have created 58 Variation Labels and managed to create the hierarchies.
Checkout Andrew Connell's book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007
Yes, I have experiance working with a high number of Variation labels. It is not fun. Eventually we dropped use of Variations for managing our multi-lingual sites. We basiclly built a customized solution that is similar to Varitions but works the way we want it to.
Found a technet article explaining this:
A variation label is an identifier that is used to name and configure a new variation site. You select one variation label as the source, which represents the site where most of the new content enters the system. The corresponding variation labels are the target labels, representing the sites to which content is copied. (Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports up to 50 labels.) You create variation sites from variation labels by using the Create Hierarchy command on the Variation Labels page of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 site administration pages.