CHM won't display on SharePoint web site

[K_Baine]

I created a .chm and published it to a SharePoint web site. When you click to open the chm, it opens fine, but there is no content: no TOC and no topics.

However, if you copy the CHM from the SharePoint to your local drive, it opens and displays properly.

Has anyone else had this problem, and is there a workaround?

Thanks.

[Pete_Lees]

Hi, K,

Because you're opening the .chm file from a remote location, it is subject to some anti-hacker security restrictions that Microsoft introduced a few years ago. You can read more about these in the following article, which also describes how to work around the restrictions.

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/chm_mspatch/896358.htm

In this case, you're downloading the .chm file from a Web site, so the restrictions and workarounds described in the following Microsoft article probably apply.

"You cannot open HTML Help files from Internet Explorer after you install security update 896358 or Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902225/

The free HHReg utility available from the address below provides a nice user interface for making the registry changes described in Peter Grainge's article.

http://www.ec-software.com/products_hhreg.html

Pete

[K_Baine]

Thank you for the feedback and the links to the articles. I was not aware of this security restriction because I usually do develop WebHelp. I seriously doubt this company will want to use the workarounds.

I can generate WebHelp easily enough, but how do I put a whole folder of WebHelp files-accessible from one link on a SharePoint web site? It usually has you download single files. How do other poeple do this?

Thank you again,
Kathleen

[RoboColum_n_]

I think you'll have to talk to your Sharepoint administrator about this one. Perhaps he'd allow you access to copy all the WebHelp output files manually to a sharepoint directory and then add the link to the default HTM page via Sharepoint. Either that or publish your webhelp to a non-Sharepoint location and then link to it.

[Tom_J_]

I explained how to publish to SharePoint here: null

If your online help authoring tool has a publish feature where you can specify the file directory publish settings, it's a lot easier. (For example, Flare has a publish feature that allows you to click a button and automatically upload the webhelp files to a remote file directory location, without even logging into SharePoint.)

Having raved about SharePoint before, I'm now hesitant to recommend it as a publishing platform. The anonymous access thing can go haywire, and the site uptime seems to fluctuate like a roller-coaster.

And here's the most annoying feature of SharePoint so far: large flash files won't play. So if you have anything over 20 megs, forget it. SharePoint won't load it. I'm not sure why.

[T00kz]

I know this question was asked years ago but still worth providing the solution...I had the same problem and we discovered that it was a windows security issue. When downloading a chm file from SharePoint windows security assigns the chm file a ‘blocked’ status. This status can be overridden by clicking ‘Unblock’ on the General tab.

To fix this issue on each computer, the SharePoint site must be added as a trusted site in windows security settings.