
Can SharePoint 2007 be used as a help authoring tool? Maybe.
Giovanni from Italy asks the following about SharePoint:
I am assisting a colleague with a complete overhaul of an existing Help system. It is in RoboHelp, but has legacy topics that have to be maintained in Word. The Help is for call center and business office employees regarding the proprietary, in-house computer program. We recently got SharePoint, and I would like to know your thoughts on the pros and cons of Help in SharePoint. For example, can it be context-sensitive?
To provide some more detail, we don’t have any translations planned, although I suspect we will need to consider translating to Spanish at some point. There is a need to post PowerPoints and PDFs that are accessed through the current Help menu. We might have multiple authors (not sure).
We don’t need any conditional text , although I think it would be useful because we have several different categories of customers. I’m also advocating strongly for context-sensitive topics. We don’t need multiple outputs, not as it stands now, although I am in the process of researching content management systems and reusability, which would be a great boon to this group.
We also use Captivate and Articulate, which I would like to integrate into short show-me tutorials where appropriate.
Giovanni,
SharePoint is a good solution is if you have simple help content that doesn’t need to be printed, translated, or conditionalized. In the following two sections, I’ve outlined SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses as they relate to help authoring. Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter
iTunes











