Hosting help on a website?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Miriam wondered: <<Has anyone developed their online help to be hosted 
on a website at their company rather than a localized version on the 
user's computer, but where they link to your company's website when 
they click Help?>>

This works great if your application runs over the Web, but it may be a 
really bad idea if:
- people want to use the application off-line, such as while waiting in 
an airport lounge with no wireless access or sipping iced tea on the 
back deck
- they have a dialup connection, which means delays to establish the 
connection in the first place, a painfully slow connection, and the 
possibility of tying up their only phone line
- they have a firewall they don't know how to configure properly, or 
are prisoners of someone else's network and have no say in how the 
firewall is configured
- you don't have an ace team maintaining your Web server so that it's 
secure and doesn't go down for maintenance the one time someone needs 
to load a help file at 9 PM the night before a big deadline
- they're running Windows. Okay, sh*t happens to Macs too, but when 
Windows starts behaving flaky, things go south really fast; Macs are 
usually less likely to experience connection problems due to corruption 
of the TCP/IP stack, and there's no spyware for the Mac and very few 
Trojans of any sort. As a result, you'll have to figure out how to 
troubleshoot installations for users who have firewall software, 
antispyware software, and antivirus software all running 
simultaneously.

None of these are deal-killers, but you do have to have answers for 
each objection. Moreover:

<<We like the idea of being able to track page visits and being able to 
update content as required (for example, if there is an error, it can 
be instantly corrected, rather than waiting for the next hotfix 
release). What other pros are there to this idea? What are the cons?>>

If you implement this approach, make sure that it "degrades 
gracefully"; that is, if the user can't connect to your Web site for 
whatever reason, they can still access the help locally (e.g., from the 
software CD). You can accomplish much the same goals you're looking to 
achieve by giving users the option of connecting via the Web or working 
locally each time they open the help, or you can create an autoupdate 
function that downloads the latest version of the help file.

BTW, I don't recommend tracking usage of a local helpfile. This sounds 
like a great idea from our perspective as writers, but with all the 
hysteria over spyware, any hint that you're collecting information 
about the user and sending it to your company without their permission 
is likely to backfire big-time.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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