Regional Microsites - 'Choose your country of origin'

I manage, design and develop a website (with a small team) for a medium sized company. We have two head offices (don’t laugh) and 13 or so international sales offices. In the past, our .com site was our global (and only) website. Now, regional offices are trying to develop their own websites to satisfy specific regional requirements and language differences.

On our .com site we use HTML to communicate the basic marketing stuff, while the real meat of the site (product information and software downloads, pricing, forms, online ordering…etc.) is being driven by ASP. When the regional marketing managers told me that they were going to create these regional sites (UK, France, Germany, China, Japan, and English Asia Pacific), I gave them a copy of our root (without the database or it’s contents) and told them to use the HTML pages as a general design guide and told them to ignore all the asp stuff. They told me that they were going to develop these sites to market our products to their regions more effectively, and so I assumed that they would defer to the .com site for product support and detailed technical and partner information.

Well, now I hear that they are each developing their own databases, databases that will have the same functionality and hold the same content as the .com database. I believe this will be a nightmare, and a full time job, to keep them all in sync.

So we tried linking their sites (hosted in the region they are being created for) to our database (located in Canada), but all the ways we tried got real messy and didn’t work.

So now we are thinking about hosting all these regional sites in Canada and run them all off the same server so that they can easy connect to the database. Based on the URL (and I know there can be redirects), I see companies like Microsoft, Apple, General Electric …etc. run all their regional sites as subfolders off of their .com root, so we are thinking of doing the same thing.

My questions are these: does anyone have any experience with this? What are the draw-backs and things to watch out for when doing this? What do we have to do to our NA server (IBM, Microsoft IIS6) to allow for Japanese, Mandarin, and German text?