Embedded help

[Ian Williamson]

Greetings

Our company is in the process of converting a portion of our fat client to a web based solution. We wish to have context sensitive help, table of contents, search capability, etc that runs inline with the application.

The integrated .NET help tools seem to wrap an application as opposed to embed within it, so this does not seem to be a solution. We have explored companies such as RoboHelp, but since we are distributing our application, we do not wish to pass on licensing fees to our clients

I am curious if there are any "out of the box" help solutions for a web based application that will integrate without incurring licensing fees. So far, a half days worth of research has turned up nothing useful

Cheers, Ian Williamso

[Ken Cox [Microsoft MVP]]

Are you sure RoboHelp has runtime fees for generated help?

Anyway, you'll get better answers in microsoft.public.helpauthoring .

Ken

"Ian Williamson" <in*******@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:FB**********************************@microsof t.com...

Greetings,

Our company is in the process of converting a portion of our fat client to
a web based solution. We wish to have context sensitive help, table of
contents, search capability, etc that runs inline with the application.

The integrated .NET help tools seem to wrap an application as opposed to
embed within it, so this does not seem to be a solution. We have explored
companies such as RoboHelp, but since we are distributing our application,
we do not wish to pass on licensing fees to our clients.

I am curious if there are any "out of the box" help solutions for a web
based application that will integrate without incurring licensing fees.
So far, a half days worth of research has turned up nothing useful.

Cheers, Ian Williamson

[Ian Williamson]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Ken

As for RoboHelp. They have licencing fees for their RoboEngine, which is required if you wish to serve up your help through a web service or have reporting and natural language search capabilities. This was something we were exploring, but we can just use RoboHelp to generate WebHelp and we may be fine that way

I was really hoping to find a solution that would allow us to embed the help components (TOC, search, help window) within frames of our existing application, but no luck so far

Ia

[Bill Burns [MVP]]

Ken is correct. There aren't runtime fees for generated help. Besides, the
makers of RoboHelp get plenty for the application itself.

Bill Burns [MVP]
te********@cableone.net
"Ken Cox [Microsoft MVP]" <BA************@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:OA**************@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...

Are you sure RoboHelp has runtime fees for generated help?

Anyway, you'll get better answers in microsoft.public.helpauthoring .

Ken