WebHelp for a Lotus notes application?

[HKabaker]

I've been assigned to produce a help package for a new internal application being built around a Lotus Notes dabase. Users are on a large network with Novell, Microsoft, Domino and Unix components. They all use Notes for email and shared data bases. And, of course, they use Web browsers and many other applications not built in Lotus.

Has anyone had this experience? What's the best solution?

Forget about field-level help. I want to have one Help button on each screen that would display the appropriate topic, preferably in the full tripane format., the way we do for Web-based apps.

I know we can Launch a regular browser from the Lotus application and give it the URLs for WebHelp topics stored on the company Intranet, for example.

Can we eliminate this network traffic by building help topics into the Lotus/Domino environment?

The developers on the project are thinking about this. Initially, I'm told help topics would need to be in Rich Text Format. If this is correct, I can forget about all the interactive and automatic features we offer via html and javascript, right?

Please say it ain't so, Joe.

Harvey

[Linux Rules]

Hello harvey -
IANJ (I am not Joe) but I did work on an older version of Lotus / Domino circa 2001. I produced html pages which were hosted on Domino, including javascripts, DHTML, etc. and had no problem. Note that my dev work was in Dreamweaver, not RoboHelp but I can't think of any reason why RH shouldn't work.

Regards,
gewb

[HKabaker]

Thanks, gewb. That's what I would have told them, but I thought that maybe I wasn't understanding their problem.

If I give them a small WebHelp package to test, what should I suggest regarding where and how to store all the files?

And what kind of call would they make from their Lotus application to launch WebHelp?

Thanks.

Harvey

[HKabaker]

Oops. Double post.

Harvey

[Linux Rules · Accepted solution]

Hello Harvey -

Sounds like IBM... 8^)
If it IS, have someone get in touch with IBM Global Services in Boulder, CO - they have a lot of stuff re: Dominio and Web pages.

I didn't have to do anything special...everything was done as html and stored in Domino per it's structure. I had many nested "subdirectories" but no problems. Everything was accessed by browser over the Web with no server-side processing - everything was everyday html as far as the browser was concerned. About the only thing you need to know is the "home" URL where your work can be accessed.

If 100% internal / intranet and all pages are rendered in Lotus, pretty much the same applies except you will need to test any dynamic functionality and scripts.

If the DBA is any good, just hand him your generated project to upload to/in Domino.

Regards,
gewb