Hi, glad to have found you. As a complete know-no, could someone tell me something about developing a webhelp system for a Filemaker Pro solution? As a tech. writer I can use RoboHelp and AuthorIT and am pretty nifty with (X)HTML but have not got a clue (as yet) about Filemaker Pro.

Thanks in advance

Thanks for your question.

I don't have any great suggestions for web help driven from FileMaker, though I'll point you to some resources at the end of this post.

Unfortunately, this is not really our area of expertise, largely because we're kind of down on help systems these days. If I look back over the last 5 large custom systems we've deployed with help systems, the help system is no longer in use in any of them. (These help systems varied from large, indexed PDFs to FileMaker based context-sensitive help.)

In our experience these things are used to train the current staff on new software but *not* used to train new staff as they are hired in. That training is done by peers or supervisors without reference to the manual largely, I believe, because the manuals haven't kept up with changes in the software.

Cleveland Consulting has a very cool, dynamic help engine that makes it easy to create context-sensitive help in FileMaker (and easy for our clients to modify the help content themselves) and even where this is deployed we find the manual really doesn't get updated to match the current mods to the software.

This seems a natural contradiction in (some) FileMaker development; the more dynamic your software- the more it changes and the easier it is to modify- the less relevant the manuals become over time.

Accordingly, we have not done user manuals for the last 2 or 3 major systems we've deployed. Recently, we've switched gears entirely and embraced the "can't keep up with it" side of manual maintenance: we've added "What's New" sections to our custom projects. This module, built in FileMaker, presents users with a list of the recent mods to their software, including brief instructions on how to use the modifications and one or two screen shots per mod. The most recent items are "new" so that the splash page of the systems says something like "What's New: 4 items".

Users can of course scroll through or search for older items much as we scroll back through our email for that product announcement we now have a reason to investigate. We've also added some logging to this system so that we record which users have visited a given What's New entry: this allows our client to use the system to deliver policy changes as well as software how-tos.

This gets to one of the real problems with software manuals- at least where custom software is concerned. The manuals tend to be as much about policy as about the software: not only "how to" mark a client as "inactive" (for example) but when to do so, who can or should do so, etc. We have always wanted to get out of the business of writing policy documents for our clients, hence we've delivered our manuals (and now our What's New) systems in FileMaker Pro so that clients can author the content themselves, or at least modify it.

Sorry to go on and on. Here are some resources you might check out for making help systems in FileMaker or web publishing FileMaker help systems:

Start Learning about web publishing FielMaker 7 databases here: http://www.filemaker.com/downloads/pdf/ ... ishing.pdf

ProHelp FileMaker Help Templates: http://www.onegasoft.com/tools/prohelp/index.shtml

Good FileMaker web publishing references: http://www.fmwebschool.com/products.htm

HTH,

John