SharePoint Projects and Your Client….. Change and Conflicts

Whenever we start a new SharePoint project the technical team always has concerns about getting the right requirements from the client and get back to offices in order to kick off development.


What always technical team concerned with, is to get final and confirmed requirements to do not replicate any efforts, but unfortunately always technical team are facing this issue again and again, and in some cases the project is almost closed and still new requirements and changes are being requested.

Management team is worried about time and scope for the project; always they are trying to keep within scope with minimal time needed.

All above still not causing any problems, problems appear whenever management team tries to cut time and cost at the expense of technical standards and overall quality for the solution.

At this stage, and whenever the client start to feel this, he will try to refuse the new technology that will take place and you will face very hard obstacles to get any requirements and the relationship between the client and the software vendor begin to appear as a type of enmity.

Management team should always consider that whenever you are going to rollout a new SharePoint solution to the client, you are trying to Change something in their day-to-day environment. So if the software vendor did not treat the relationship with his client as Partnership relation and try to apply this new SharePoint project hand in hand, the client will refuse the new technology and Conflicts will start to appear on the surface.

And even if the client accepted it for the time being, they are not going to adopt your new technology for the future, then its just a time matter until they start to look for another new technology, and sure software vendor will lose this account.

What I mean that you have to consider the Change and Conflicts in your project plans for SharePoint projects; as SharePoint solutions always affect and change the way employees are using to achieve their daily work.

I think that we are missing the Partnership relation dealing with clients, really its so critical right here to spend some much more time to build this relation, and give the client the feeling that you are coming for his convenience and hand in hand this new technology will be a successful story for both sides.

Error: 'Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls'

I got this error while I’m working on Intranet Portal SharePoint Project, we have created many custom site definitions, list definitions, content types and Page Layouts in this project.


Whenever we create sites based on our custom site template, and after the creation completes, I got this error:

“Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls”.

Note that all internal pages were working fine (Site Settings page, All site content page,….etc).

So finally it was a problem caused by Page Layouts, also some page layouts were working fine and some are not.

I opened the corrupted page layouts in SharePoint Designer, and found that below lines have been appended to the end of the page, and if I remove them the corrupted page layout works fine !!!!

Still one thing to do !! what caused this generated code to be appended? so I made a  comparison between corrupted layout pages and the working ones, I found just below difference:

All letters in above two tags were written in lowercase, and after change them back as in the above ones (capital 'C' in "Content"), and tested the above scenario again (created same sites again), everything worked fine and I never get this error again.

Joining This Great Blog

It is a big pleasure and honor for me to join Moutasem Al-Awa in this Blog - a special friend and colleague.
New blog has just been created, new blog with big ambitions to share and contribute with the IT community in General, and the MS SharePoint people in particular.
Hope we will be up to this.

And here we just started,

Best Regards,
Hamza

New day at new company

Hi , My name is Moutasem Al-awa. I am a SharePoint and .NET developer with 2 years of experience.
I used to work in SSSProcess (My Old company) and today i started a new job in eBECS, a British company provides Dynamics AX.
This is my first time for blogging and this is a new experience for me, so i hope to enjoy it, get it well and share knowledge and expertise with the community.

Till the next post...