Hey everyone,
I'm the RoboHelp administrator around here - I've done some
RoboHelp projects and created the procedures, stylesheets and
templates for our company's WebHelp, WinHelp 2000, and JavaHelp
projects, but now I'm sort of the consultant for the content
authoring team that creates the help systems. I think I need to
call in some help from the forum about a project I'm consulting on.
Here's the situation: A project team here thinks they want
field-level help to support a web-based application. I've told them
"That's fine, it's possible, just don't demand that the help author
create topics for EVERY field, even the obvious ones like "Name",
"Address", "Zip", etc, since there is very, very little value in
doing that." We already have a very old help system that is being
CONVERTED to WinHelp 2000 (from a "mocked-up" version of WinHelp)
that did just that - every field in every screen was a separate
topic, even if it wasn't useful. Every topic was essentially "This
information goes in this field". As a result, we abandoned creating
an Index, since we had about 27 entries for "Name", 13 for
"Address1", 15 for "Address2", etc.
Well, I just heard back yesterday that they totally ignored
my suggestion and they want to go ahead with the "all help for all
fields" idea. I still think I have a chance of convincing them to
choose context-sensitive topics wisely, if it can present my case
clearly and be persuasive. I just found John Daigle's article about
context sensitive help (
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/context_help.html)
and I'm looking at it now (very well done, by the way - thanks
John!). It looks like, from first glance, that it might convince
that project team that "Whoa, this context-sensitive thing is more
than we bargained for", which is what I want them to think, since
they have very limited resources and a help author that is VERY new
to RoboHelp and WebHelp. I personally have never built a
context-sensitive help project with different windows, but I have
built several projects using conditional builds.
What does everyone think of this approach?
Thanks,
Jim