Customized Help for some customers

[davidgolden99]

We are planning to offer customized help as a professional service to our customers. What is the best way to integrate these customizations into the standard help file? Looking forward, how would you maintain the custom help as new software versions are released and the standard help is updated?

[LTinker68]

What might work is to create new projects that have different skins and stylesheets, but all the topics are pulled from a master project via the project linking feature. That way the content is served from the master project and pulled at build time, but the appearance of the help is driven by the skin and stylesheet of the custom project. You'd have to make sure, however, that you didn't create any new styles in each project's stylesheet but rather just modified the appearance of the existing styles. You'd also have to copy the stylesheet from the master project into the custom project so that you have a starting point for the custom stylesheet.

That's all in theory -- I haven't used the project link feature so I'm not sure how easy it is to pull numerous topics from a master project.

[davidgolden99]

Thanks Lisa. I'll read up on that.

I should provide some more detail. The product screens & workflow can be customized with Visual Basic. Our custom help will document the customer's customization of the product. The only change to the skin would be the customer's logo instead of our own in the toolbar, although I might consider a stylesheet to provide a different color font or background for custom topics.

[LTinker68]

That gets a tad bit more complicated if you're displaying screenshots. Then you have to add in condition tags to show and hide the appropriate content. If you're going to swap the logo in the toolbar then you'd probably still want to do what I suggested because you'd have to create a new skin in order to show the different logo, and you don't want the customized skin in the same output as the non-customized help. The only way to do that is what I suggested. But you could still keep the content in a master project and use condition tags to control what content is outputted for each customer.