Return to Home Page 2ND ANNUAL HELP TECHNOLOGY UPDATE CONFERENCE
A Report from Cambridge, MA.

B Y  C H R I S   T H I E S S E N
Kentuckiana chapter

 

This year's attendance (around 425) added about 50-75 more folks than last year's inaugural event. Joe Welinske's learned from WinHelp not to grow these conferences too fast despite demand. For that reason, the hotel and crowd size was nicely matched. This is my biased report on what I thought significant.

Introduction Joe Welinske opened with observations on what Microsoft is doing with Help. He noted trends (Win98 integrates HTML Help into Windows; Money99 is an example of an application that looks webbish but runs from the desktop; Office2000 - due out 1Q99 -- to be the first all HTML Help application) that will inevitably set user expectations on how Help should look, whether we like the paradigm shift or not. Joe waxed particularly enthusiastic about Microsoft's game Age of Empires (an IOCC '98 winner and a finalist for the '98 Best of Show award). He cited its user interface and inventive use of SHED graphics (although they reminded me of the interface and graphics used in a CD education program on the Dead Sea Scrolls, put out in 1995). Joe also noted a Microsoft development called FlipHelp, which resolves a long-standing challenge with games and help systems. Games traditionally take over the entire screen, which means that when you call help the game has to stop, some programmatic nasties have to occur to free up a section of the screen, and then the help and/or game really doesn't work well thereafter. With FlipHelp, Microsoft literally punches a hole through the game mode window. This allows the game to run at normal speed and enables you to access help, which does not disrupt the game logic. Finally, Joe touched on the advances of Windows CE (Windows operating system for Consumer Electronics), which uses a variety of HTML-based Help called Help for Windows CE (those MS marketeers must have been up all night dreaming up that label). And to demonstrate that not everyone is slavishly kowtowing to the wizards of Redmond, Welinske noted that Intuit has declined the opportunity to move to HTML Help. So there's still room for individuality.
HTML Help Update Mark Buckley, one of two Program Managers for HTML Help, announced a basic slowing of the frenetic timetable originally cited by Ralph Walden at WinHelp two years ago. Microsoft has paused to refine HTML Help, employing it in Money 99 and in Visual Studio 6.0, which drives the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) CDs. The primary deficit of WinHelp was that it did not scale well to monster sizes, such as in the MSDN; for that reason, MS sees the future as HTML Help based.

Schedules
HTMLHelp 1.1a was released with Windows 98; HTML Help 1.1b (which is a bug fix of 1.1a and posted on the MS website) shipped with Money 99 and Visual Studio 6.0. Release 1.2 is scheduled for October 15th 98, and will be available on the MS website. It will be used in Office 2000, and contains a number of features, including:

  • Persistence (which basically remembers screen size, screen position, tab selection, and other characteristics)
  • Favorites tab
  • Advanced (author-selectable) full-text search
  • Auto-hide navigation
  • F1 for keyword help from the topic window

Personally, I didn't get the feeling that this was a major wowser in terms of advancements. Version 1.3 (release date TBD) will provide multilingual support, and version 2.0 will provide the ability to update compiled HTML over the web and other "robustnesses" - including full implementation of information types!

Again, as Mark and his companions Shane McRoberts (the other Program Manager) and Peter Plamondon (the Technical Evangelist and Ralph Walden's spiritual successor) answered questions, I just felt that Microsoft is proceeding much more slowly than they originally professed in this environment. Was that due to Ralph's desire to move forward faster or technological hesitancy on the part of MS? Don't know.

Converting from Windows Help - Scott Boggan After my Monday afternoon chat with Scott (who, like Cheri Zubak, is designated as one of Microsoft's MVP Help Developers), I realized he had been through many of the same kinds of things we all currently face. I thought it might be useful to attend both of his sessions, since he seemed to want to provide solution-based information.

This session was basically an awareness exercise in understanding what you have to go through in order to move from WinHelp to HTMLHelp (hereafter WH vs. HH, since I'm tired of typing out the full names). This process is a conversion; although Scott mentioned five conversion tools, he focused on two: Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop and Blue-Sky's RoboHelp. To test the results, Scott developed an absolutely hilarious WH file (which may be available at his website: www.oz.net/~scottb) that encapsulated all of the Walker Richter Quinn (WRQ) styles and formattings. That way he could compare the input versus output, and assess the extra amount of work required to accomplish the HH result he wanted.

Essentially, WRQ found out that they needed to do a considerable amount of pre- and post-processing of the converted files. Scott wrote a number of WordBasic macros (yes, they are still on Word6) to manipulate the WH files and then found a Java programmer at WRQ to assist in the cleanup of the HH files. Interestingly, WRQ chose to use Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop as their conversion tool, primarily because it allowed them the least invasive method of conversion, and because they had the resources to perform the pre- and post-processing tweaks.

Lesson
WH to HH is not a clean process. Build a test file of all your styles, headings, and special processing requirements and convert it to determine the level of effort required to accomplish what you need.

WinHelp Development at WRQ: A Case Study - Scott Boggan This session ran concurrently with Joe Welinske's talk on using Acrobat as an online help tool, so it was a difficult choice. I had reviewed the slides the night before and talked with Joe about his sources, and decided that the case study might be more applicable to our general needs.

Scott mentioned two topics near to my heart: his migration to a single set of authoring tools and his discussion on source control. WRQ still uses Word6, largely due to the number of WordBasic macros they've developed to standardize and streamline their workflow. Scott is willing to admit that they will be moving to Word 7 and VisualBasic, but the conversion of the macro library will be a daunting task. They are a RoboHelp shop (since they primarily develop WH), and his discussion of how they standardized 200+ styles to 60 and developed standardized work practices to come to the point of standardization was painful to recount.

CopyDots is a tool they've developed to ensure that all writers use the most current Word template. Since the non-scrolling region of their help files (which, incidentally, gets destroyed in the conversion from WH to HH) is complex, they developed WordBasic macros to create a standard dialog box, simplifying the activities of each writer. Since WRQ produces a variety of products, they've inserted a number of conditional codes in source files, which must be processed to produce the product-specific documentation.

But it was Scott's discussion on source control that I found most interesting. Due to a large number of problems, WRQ's documentation department began to use Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe (interestingly, each department at WRQ is responsible for its own control; the software developers don't even have a source control system). Scott also implemented a control system for artwork, which previously had been a "pigpile" of files on the shared server.

Finally, he displayed a "wrapper help" system WRQ uses to encapsulate their product help files. Essentially it's a packaging of a number of help systems into a single opening panel that provides a central gateway to all the help system from a single point. WRQ uses an IfThenElse macro to check for the appropriate files and flavor the launched help system. An impressive way to consolidate chaos.

Conclusions Since I had to leave early for my plane, I could not attend the final session of the day, which would have been Cheri Zubak's HTML Help Case Study. I asked both Cheri and Scott about their long-awaited "Designing HTML-based Help" book, which has been held up due to changes in the tools. I urged both of them to go ahead, since no book currently exists that addresses the aspects of design in HH, and that aspect alone is what continues (at least in my mind) to provide worth to the Win3x version of Designing Online Help for Windows that I have. We shall see what they do.

I walked away from the conference with several perspectives (as well as a copy of Managing Documentation Projects in an Imperfect World, which I heartily recommend):

  • I am convinced that some form of HH is probably the vehicle for the future, but whether it's a viable solution rests entirely on the techno-sophistication of our customer bases. How quickly - and whether - anyone moves from WH to HH depends entirely on the ability of customers to use the functionality.

  • The maturation of HH has slowed considerably, possibly as a result of Ralph Walden's departure from Microsoft. The current group of program managers and techno-visionaries don't seem as zealous as Ralph. This may be a good short-term business goal, but a large part of getting people excited by an emerging technology is to have a good visionary, and Ralph was a major component of that enthusiasm. It should be interesting to see what he and Cheri Zubak cook up in the next few years.

That's about it, at least from my perspective. Next year's WinHelp conference (in the Emerald City) is supposedly going to be a good one, since it's the 10th anniversary of the release of WinHelp (but only the 7th anniversary of the WinHelp Conference). Joe tells me that he's got some special stuff in mind, maybe with a guest appearance of the Wizard (Ralph Walden) himself. HTUC3 should be in downtown Boston next year, and will move more towards 500-650 attendees. You might want to start circling early February (for WinHelp) and or September (for HTUC3) on your corporate calendars. I plan to attend at least one.

Return to Home Page Chris Thiessen is a senior member of the Kentuckiana STC chapter. For the past three years he has telecommuted from Lexington, KY into his Atlanta office, which has been the latest adventure in a two-decade career of developing software documentation for a variety of companies. You can reach Chris at Christopher.E.Thiessen@ceridian.com.