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I currently produce dynamic help. The help content displays dynamically - based on user privileges and a user's access to specific modules and features. This type of help is considerably harder to set up, write, and to test. But it can be produced & added to an application.
My advice - since it sounds like you're looking at a similar effort - is to meet with your developers. You may be able to piggyback on what they're doing - reuse their coding in your help files.
You may also need to move away from RoboHelp - I did. I initially produced my dynamic help using Dreamweaver. More recently, I moved to AuthorIT. My help output consists of individual html pages and an xml file for the table of contents.
Kim Babinski <Babinski -at- BAUERCONTROLS -dot- com> wrote:
For nearly ten years I have worked at a small software company that
develops applications used primarily in automotive powertrain testing.
Until now, all of our documentation has been delivered in printed form,
but we are just now venturing into the world of online help. With a
copy of RoboHelp and several books on planning a help system, I felt
adequately equipped to begin developing a simple, standard help system.
However, I have now been asked to begin by developing context sensitive
help that will detect and display the project-specific details of a test
in progress. This would not be window- or field- level help, rather it
would dynamically linked to test sequence and the data being collected
and would differ for each installation. This seems like it would be
more of a software feature than an online help feature.
Has anyone ever seen or developed anything like this?
I'd appreciate any suggestions!
Kim Babinski
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