editable help systems
Subject: editable help systems
From: "McIntosh, Cathleen" <Cathleen -dot- McIntosh -at- vistacpg -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:23:05 -0500
X-Message-Number: 25
I currently work at a software company that develops point of sale software for the automotive service industry. Although we have a core product, almost every package we publish is heavily customized per the client's wishes.
Because each client often has different business rules (and because I'm a lone writer with a life), we had to come up with a fast way to integrate business rules with our on-line help product's help system. What we decided to use was WinHelp's annotation feature.
If you open a WinHelp file and click the edit button, one of the choices you'll see is "annotate". Click that selection and you see a window where you can type whatever you like. When you save the information, you'll see a small paper clip graphic beside the title of the Help topic. Click that graphic and the annotation window opens with the information you typed earlier.
Help file annotations are stored in a separate file - what our clients do is write the annotation files and then transmit them to each of their shops.
The disadvantage to such a system is that end-users can modify the annotation files - sometimes inadvertently. All they have to do is reload the original annotation file to recover.
We did have one client who went out and bought RoboHelp in order to modify the files directly. I, unfortunately, became the support staff for that client. The client eventually reverted back to the annotation approach when he grew tired of pumping out a new help file on a weekly basis.
Russ
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