User Customizable Help

[ktbCA57]

So, some of our customers have expressed the desire to have online help that allows them to participate in creating content. Mostly this is so they can include "best practices" and/or "business processes" for their particular industry - alleviating us of having to drill down into industry specifics and just focus on our own product.

That said, one of our developers was thinking that it could be something as simple as allowing the customers to create their "contribution" as a Word or PDF file... then some how link it in to our help system.

so my questions are these:

1) Can you attach something like this? if so, would the customer be able to upload their content whenever they needed to or would WE have to update it for them (i'm thinking the latter rather than the former)... probably a blonde question.. but just in case, i asked.

2) is there a BETTER way of going about such a thing?

Thanks for any ideas or input you might have...

kb

[LTinker68]

You could try one of MadCap's Feedback products --> http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/feedback/. Not only can they provide feedback, including comments, but you get reporting features from it as well. MadCap uses it on their knowledgebase, so you can see it in action --> http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/.

[NorthEast]

The MadCap feedback service will let your users add comments to your help topics, and you can choose to moderate (approve) their comments before they are public. This wouldn't let your users create their own content though, or edit/add to existing content.

If your users want to be able to create their own content, then a wiki site would be more appropriate. There are a number of free wiki tools, and they aren't too hard to set up. The content in the wiki would be completely separate from the help you produce in Flare, but you could have links between the two.

For either solution, how well it will work really depends on your user base, and how active they will be in either adding comments or contributing to a wiki. It might be worth trying to find out what your users would like, and how much interest there is, and then decide on what path to take.

[Andrew]

Do you produce CHM, or is this WebHelp? If it's CHM, I'd suggest you take a look at this topic.

If it's WebHelp, you have a lot of options, especially if the help is hosted on a web server (and if hosted on a web server where they have to log in, even better). You could fairly easily create your own custom code that enabled an annotation feature. Even if it wasn't one that enabled users to change what already appears in the help topic, they could add their own content, either as a link, or as a kind of appendix on a topic.

[KevinDAmery]

Much as I've been anti-wiki here in the last little while, like Dave I think this is one of those cases where a wiki does make sense, especially if the customer needs to make their own topics about their own business practices and procedures.

[Andrew]

One thing I experimented with a while back was linking to a wiki from your online help (CHM or WebHelp). Basically, use a wiki that creates new topics simply by trying to reach them (like MediaWiki, the one that runs Wikipedia), and then create some JavaScript or other code that tries to reach a wiki page with the same name as your topic title. That's sort like instant customer-editable linked documentation. And, depending on how you (your customers, really) deploy it, it could be used for all customers, or each customer could create their own local wiki.

[NorthEast]

Yep, I'm not pro or anti-wiki. They're just in fashion, and a bit like blogs, it seems like everyone has made one just for the sake of it.

If you want to do collaborative authoring though, then that's what they're designed for.

It's worth having a look around and see what is out there. Generally they're not that hard to set up, it's probably worth asking the person who manages your website for help and advice about setting it up and hosting it. One thing to check out is is whether you can export (or import) information from the wiki database. At some point you will probably want to get some of the information out, or change to a different wiki tool.

[ktbCA57]

First.. THANK YOU ALL for these ideas... really appreciated...

Secondly...
In addition to the Wiki idea.. which isn't out of the question, is there a good way or ANY way that clients could actually link documents to the online help.

For instance, our head developer was thinking one option might be to set up a "repository" somewhere in the system that the customers could access.. they could then put their docs there.. then go to a specific place in the online help to connect (link) that doc to the online help itself.. this way... let's say there would be a topic Called "Best Practices"... the user could then click on that link and see a list of documents (and links to those documents).. they could then peruse the list and access the various documents that have been set up by the client.??

any ideas on this?

THANKS AGAIN...

[LTinker68]

You might be able to do something, but they're not features within Flare itself. You could use Javascript or other code that you could copy-and-paste into a topic where the user could select a file to upload, give it a title and maybe a short description, and then another topic that uses different code to display the files, titles, and descriptions that have been uploaded. But you'd need to work with your website admin and IT dept. to set up a way for the uploaded files to be scanned for viruses before they're listed, perhaps even set up login accounts so that only the customers can access those pages, and so on.

You could (theoretically) use an include statement at the bottom of topics that calls (lists) only the files that the user indicated apply to that topic, but that would require a database and a lot more setup.

So it's nothing something you can do directly in Flare, but if you're producing WebHelp output that is served from a web server, then you can incorporate the necessary code into a topic in Flare.