After a long time I picked up one of my favorite tasks: building Online Help. Having said that I am quite sure a substantial number of you will frown as I know from the past it was not common that people around me did really like that.
So why do I like it? To me it’s one of those missing links a user experiences when confronted with some nice peace of software he should start to use and the fact that there is no one around to instruct him in some way. Oh yes, I know NAV Online Help (OLH) is not always the best gap filler, but it’s there and to be honest the UA team has really done a much better job on Online Help lately.
Did you manage to get Online Help in place?
But OK, I had not intended to write a post on what I like doing. No, while working on this Online Help project I was actually remembering all the fuss I had gone through years ago trying to master the full extend of creating OLH. In my case I was working on the help for the Dutch Telebanking module at the time our GDL team started to pick up the localization of NAV 4.0 (or what was then just renamed Microsoft Business Solutions – Navision). Getting to understand the various tools, the various steps to take and not in the least how to phrase so that my topics would not differ too much from the standard topics. Oh, and of course understand the functionality to it’s full extend. I would almost forget that, where it typically was a big challenge as Telebanking already existed for some years, only little documentation existed and the initial developer was long gone. Most probably a situation not unfamiliar to most of us.
So I was wondering how did you all manage to get the Online Help for your add-on in place?
CfMD
You know a couple of years ago, way before MS did lay me off, I was considering to go out on my own offering my OLH expertise. So I conducted a small survey among Dutch NAV partners. It was clear cut that quite some of them had not done anything around OLH. For obvious reasons like the ones mentioned above next to little to none direct need for it. In the mean time, however, MS set up the Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) program which a.o. made it compulsory to have OLH for the add-on you want to certify.
So how did for all these get OLH in place?
Can I invite you to enter your answers to my questions below? [8-|]