Because everyone is expected to migrate over to Sharepoint, I figured I would share the lessons I learned when I moved my webpage from the HTML on qcpages over to Sharepoint. This page is unofficial; I wanted to post it to help others for when they start their transition to Sharepoint.

The (only) benefits I see from moving to Sharepoint are:

1. The automatic generation of site navigation menu and links based on your chosen site structure. (See top of page.)
2. The archival process—If you accidentally overwrite an old version of your webpage, you can always revert to a previous version of the page.
3. The automatic updating of links—If you rename a file/page in your personal directory, Sharepoint automatically updates ALL links to this file/page throughout your website.

• Related to number 3 above, Sharepoint will NOT LET YOU SAVE a webpage if it can not verify the address of a hyperlink reference. At this point Sharepoint tells you to use "auto-correct", but unable to do so I had to try to remove every link until I found the one Sharepoint did not like.
• Relative hyperlinks in your own page must be everything after the http://people.qc.cuny.edu/. For example, the link to this page would be <a href="/faculty/christopher.hanusa/resources/Pages/Sharepoint.aspx"> instead of simply "Sharepoint.aspx".

• "Check in" your page frequently to save your work. This is the only way to save our work; I sometimes forget to check in my page before clicking some link only to return to the previous version of my page. Very frustrating! (Don't forget to publish your page once it's ready to go live.)
• Create "sites" instead of folders to organize your website files. If you look at my website organization, you can see that I created three main sites (Research, Courses, and Resources) and each one of them has a different "Theme" (choose them from Site Settings). Then under courses, I created a new site for each course. Both sites and pages show up as links in the automatically generated menu.
• When you create a new content page, always choose "Welcome page with summary links" and edit the content directly via the web interface. By choosing this option, you are able to edit the content of the page directly in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome,...) and on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux...). In addition, you have the opportunity to add web parts to your page, which can allow you to personalize your page even more and add interesting third-party features to your page.
• Optionally, enable RadEditor on each site you create. To do this, go to the "Modify all Site Settings" page and click on "Site Features". At the bottom of this page is "Use RadEditor to edit HTML fields". RadEditor allows you to edit the content of the page using menus using a "What you see is what you get" editor with toolbars, similar to how Microsoft Word works. The downside to activating this feature is that RadEditor will modify the underlying HTML as it sees fit; for those among us who don't like Microsoft modifying the format of everything you type, it is disturbing to see the ugly HTML behind the scenes. Also, be aware that when the server transitions from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010, this option may no longer be available.
• The "Manage all site content" page is helpful when you are copying one page or site; simply use the down arrow next to what you wish to copy, and select the target where you wish to copy it.
• Sharepoint will serve HTML pages, so when I originally migrated my qcpages site over to Sharepoint, I converted my pages one by one over from .html to .aspx pages instead of all at one time.

• I created my own master page (Right-click to save). A master page is the file that Sharepoint uses to define the structure of your website. This is why there is no "people@QC" header on this (or any other) page. I am making it available to others so that you might use it yourself, but you use it at your own risk since there are things which don't work perfectly. And I urge you continue to use the People_QC.master page as the master page for your landing page in order to achieve some of the desired Queens College branding effect. To use this master page, you will need to upload it to your own directory (under the folder Master Page Gallery) and then on the "Modify all Site Settings" page for each subsite, go to the Master page menu to choose chanusa.master.
• There is a free Microsoft program called Microsoft Sharepoint Designer which only runs on PCs. This is a way for you to directly edit the HTML behind each page in the website. However, editing the website in this way makes you dependent on loading Sharepoint Designer each time you want to edit the pages. Whereas, by editing the files as I describe above, you can edit every webpage via any browser's web interface. After playing around with Sharepoint Designer, I ended up using it only to make the master page mentioned here, but nothing else related to the page. Do realize that as of November 2010, People@QC is running Sharepoint 2007, so you need to download Sharepoint Designer 2007. In the future, People@QC will be upgraded to Sharepoint 2010, at which point you will need to download Sharepoint Designer 2010.