How to enable Anonymous access for SharePoint 2010/2013/2016/2019 sites

In this post I will share my experience for making a SharePoint 2016 web application/site anonymous. The procedure is very much the same which we used to have for SharePoint 2010/2013 web application and exactly same approach need to be taken for SharePoint 2019 application.

Extending web application:

Well it depends on methodology and practices, but I used to extend current web application and apply anonymous access for extended application and used default site for admin purposes only. So following steps are needed to make a site anonymous.

Step 1:
As mentioned above we need to extend our current web application (if required). If extending of application isn't require, Step 1 can be skipped.

Step 2:
Select application and click on authentication provider and select zone which you need to make site anonymous. I choose internet zone as shown below

Step 3:
In Authentication provider, we checked "Enable Anonymous access" setting. Other setting can be chosen as per need example for crawling related to search NTLM based setting or kerberos or Role based authentication & authorization etc

Step 4:
Then click on web application and choose Anonymous policy. Here we can define authorization restriction based on specified zone (if we want it to assigned to user). For my case and for internet zone I choose No Policy

Step 5:
Then we need to go to extended site (if created) or sharepoint site and go to site settings & Site permissions. In my case I have variations enable, so I need to go to top level site settings under site collection administrator, as by default in variation site, site will redirect to root level variation. If you need to understand how variation or multilingual site creation work then it is in my another blogpost.

Under top level site settings under Users & Permissions section click on Site Permission and then choose anonymous access

This is all settings which is required for making a site anonymous and once visiting this site it serve as anonymous.

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How to configure multilingual site: variation in SharePoint 2013/2016/2019

In this post I will quickly walk through steps we used to perform while creating multilingual site in SharePoint 2016. Same steps need to be followed for SharePoint 2013 & SharePoint 2019.

Variation brief:

Variations feature is provided by Microsoft in SharePoint to provide & propagate multilingual content management through SharePoint application. In simple term variation is managed through labels (subsite for each language).

Step 1:

First of all install language pack by downloading it from Microsoft site. Once language pack is installed we will continue to Step 2.

Step 2:

Then under site settings at top level site, under Site Collection Administrator click on variation settings. Most of these setting are self-explanatory and can be changed late on based on customized requirements.

Step 3:

Here we are creating english as root site and choose locale as english as well. Also I choose top level site as source/target level variation.

Step 4:

In this step we would create other labels/variations for required multilingual sites e.g. arabic etc.

I used to allow both human & machine translation and i choose allow automatic update target variation pages

Since variation creation hierarchy is a timer job and if Arabic or other language hierarchy isn't created and we need to do it manually then we need to run it from SharePoint Central Admin -> Monitor -> Review Job Definitions under Time Jobs and click "Variation Create Hierarchy Job Definition" by selecting current web application

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