Typical Translation Manager system user (ServiceTcmUserName)?

Question

As a follow-up to this original question, What are the user accounts for these extensions and modules?, I wanted to confirm some questions about the "system user" for a Translation Manager installation.

This is the ServiceTcmUserName mentioned in the Translation Manager configuration documentation.

Questions:

1. As hinted at in Send to Translation in Workflow (Auto activity) not sending in-workflow version and Does TMS only check the version number of the localized component to decide if Component is eligible for Translation?, the Translation Manager could be in fact the MTSUser, but doesn't need to be, correct?
2. If not MTSUser, what would be a typical naming convention for the TM user (or what would you recommend)? Apparently "MTS" is from a default convention that was never changed.
3. Is this user the same as the database user that is mentioned in the documentation?

Answer 1

1. Yes you can use MTSUser. I believe we even defaulted to MTSUser to make sure it "worked out of the box" even though I always recommended changing it.
2. As the user is easily identifiable as the translation manager service - and not a user anything will do. Putting TranslationManager in the name should do the trick.
3. No, they are not the same user.

When the Translation Manager windows service is running, it needs to:

• Read and update Tridion items (including localize etc). This is done through the Core Service and will therefore require a Tridion user.
• Read and write it's own data keeping track of the translation process. As this data is not accessible through the Core Service it needs to make its own connection to the database. And for this, it needs a user as defined on the database system.

Originally Translation Manager had it's own database. But as it updates the state of Tridion items in a transaction with its own translation job metadata this would result in a distributed transaction.

The move to cloud solutions started to make this problematic so we added support for using the main Tridion CM database to store the translation data as well - but TM was not aware of this - all it needed was the connection string - it does not care if there is other data (like TCM) in the same database. The database user mentioned in the documentation is needed to construct this connection string.