Microsoft Help v.3 Preview

April Reagan of Microsoft will be talking about Microsoft Help v3 at the WritersUA conference:

"Microsoft Help 3 is a new client help system. This help system has been built from the ground up with simplicity, performance and relevance in mind. It was not a straightforward road in getting the project approved, and with a large legacy content base and complex content scenarios, it took a lot of long and heated design discussions with a will to favor simplicity. The end result is a greatly improved deployment model, a fast underlying architecture based on the Zip storage standard and a beautiful new Windows Presentation Foundation based help viewer featuring a web-browser feel. Initially shipping as the product help system for the next wave of Visual Studio products, this system will become available to all Windows developers in the near future. This will be the first wide release of a help system from Microsoft since Help 1."



WritersUA is looking like it will be a great conference this year.

Wikis instead of Help?

Zoho has decided to use its own wiki to provide online Help instead of Help created in RoboHelp. They have posted on their blog the reasons why they have done this, together with the benefits resulting from this change.

This is what the help looks like now.

We're not anti wikis and we're not pro RoboHelp, but nearly all the benefits seem to relate to how the Help was produced and not to what was delivered.
For example:
With a move to a wiki, the users seem to have lost a table of contents that follows where you are in the document.
The individual pages are very very long, unlike the short screen size pages normally you get with RoboHelp generated Help.
There's no pop-up Help topics (for things like glossary descriptions).

These problems may be down to bad information design rather than technical limitations, but it seems fair to say that this change has brought disadvantages as well as advantages with it.

Adobe to launch a new Help browser?

At yesterday's Ticad conference Adobe's Mark Wheeler (MD Northern Europe) spent time in his presentation talking about Adobe Air. Mark suggested it could be used as a new Help (or document) viewer technology.

Air enables anyone to build a simple desktop application. Used a Help browser, it can integrate content residing on the PC with other content residing on the Web. User comments/annotations could be displayed at the bottom of the page. Air also offers the abilty to embed two way audio , call up an extract of a video, and include Flash files, PDFs and HTML.

Air is currently in beta and is available from labs.adobe.com

He also talked about Acrobat files that can be "turned off" should you wish users no longer to view the file.

And RoboHelp? Mark said very briefly it remains a core product, but didn't say anything more about it.

Which vendor wins the battle of the Help Authoring Tools?

With the recent releases of new Help Authoring Tool versions for RoboHelp, AuthorIT and Flare, plus the release of Quadralay's ePublisher 9.3, does this affect which Help Authoring Tool you should purchase?

What I find interesting is the different ways in which the tool vendors perceive the issue of creating user assistance. If you want to create great online Help, with paper being a secondary consideration, you will probably prefer RoboHelp or Flare. If you have a team of people writing, you will probably prefer AuthorIT or ePublisher. If you need to translate the content, then all four of these tools have strengths in their different ways. If you want to generate XML, then Flare, ePublisher or AuthorIT.

The best approach is probably to create a statement of requirements for your situation and then use this as a benchmark when considering each tool. Here are a few factors to consider:

The need to localise content.
How many writers will be involved.
Whether you are creating new content or re-using existing content.
If you need single or multimedia output.
Your view of users and the feedback they might provide.
How much content you might be able to re-use.

Harry Potter and the deathly Help file

Last night, my family and I went to the midnight party of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" at The Lion and the Unicorn book shop in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey. This children's book shop is located in a narrow paved alley, so the queue of 100-odd people dressed up as wizards conjured up an image straight out of Diagon Alley.

So what does this have to with Help files? Walking back to the car park, I remembered that, in the distant past, in our time at Digitext, we wrote the text for the Helper character in "Lego Creator Harry Potter". We were asked to write help text appropriate for an eight-year old boy (Lego is for boys, apparently). This lead to issues like, do eight-year olds understand the word "cylinder"? It was agreed they didn't, so we had to come up with an alternative term that would work internationally. We eventually settled on "this type of object is like a baked bean tin". It was a great project to work on.

My 8 year old bounced out of bed, six hours later (groan). How do they do that?

Displaying Help as a toolbar in Word

Here is an innovative way to provide users with access to documentation: a small (622KB) add-in that adds a "Get Started" tab to the Ribbon in Word 2007. The tab is a set of redirects to Word 2007 Help topics, demos, animated guides and support resources on Microsoft's Office Online Web site. There are also "Getting Started" tabs for Excel 2007 & PowerPoint 2007.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=F587370C-FDAE-4EDE-B528-AC58031A5DFF&displaylang=en