Integration with SharePoint help – Can we do it?
Hi,
It's been a while since I posted. As you may imagine, August/September are not popular months to spend in the office (or in the Office Server). However, I'm back and packed with loads of new information. This post will address a very hot issue in MOSS – how to customize the SharePoint Help?
When you think about it, everything else in SharePoint is fully customizable. It would be fair to assume that a customized portal needs many changes in the Help section to document the branded features for the users. Well, tough luck. No tool can provide a nice and supported way to do it (not even SharePoint Designer). This post will try to describe the things you can do…
My first hunch was to leverage the amazing Sandcastle tool to support MOSS. If you never heard of it - Sandcastle is Microsoft's tool for creating MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies and their associated XML comments files. Oh, and did I mention that it's free? (if you want to check it out: http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB).
After going around it for a while, I realized this is not the thing I'm looking for. For a start, the output's template is not what SharePoint Help requires. The SharePoint Help Collection requires a manifest.xml that acts as a 'help-map' file and meta-data xml's for each Help item along side with the help items themselves (HTML files, images, Help categories, Help topics etc). This collection should be CAB'd and installed with SharePoint's HCInstall.exe utility and all of those capabilities are not in Sandcastle. To make a long story short: Damm…
This looked very weird for me that no real solution exists so I went to the Product Team for answers. The feedback that I got from them is that this is a known issue but unfortunately tools for creating custom SharePoint Help will not be available until further notice (possibly for O14 as they so eloquently hinted).
Well, I guess this nice article in CodePlex is our best of bread for now. It's not much but it's the best place you can start if you need to customize those pages and have some free time in your hands: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/CustomHelpPages_SP2007.aspx
Bye,
Adir Ron.