Who can use FlexHelp?

Support/Help Desk Professionals

Since the online help is created by the application vendor and is usually a generic, "one size fits all" system, it often falls short an organization's specific needs. Perhaps the help system does not adequately address specific uses of the application that are important within the organization. Or maybe a large percentage of support incidents are related to the organization's specific computing environment and cannot be addressed with a generic system. Or perhaps the online help is just poorly written, incomplete, or put together as an afterthought by the software vendor.

FlexHelp gives the help desk staff the ability to fill in the blanks in the help system that comes with supported applications. Best of all, FlexHelp systems can be updated and expanded dynamically and maintained from a central network location. For example, if issues arise with a software upgrade, the help desk staff can create help topics to address these issues, update the system and have the information propagate throughout the organization almost immediately—resulting in a dramatic reduction in user calls.

Most of the software tools available to help desk professionals are reactive in nature. For example, you can invest in improved help desk management software or in a web-based knowledge system, but these tools simply increase the efficiency with which the support organization can respond to user incidents. FlexHelp in contrast is a proactive tool because it allows the support organization to get information to the user while the application is in use—before a support incident is even generated.

Most support professionals would probably agree that a significant percentage of incidents tend to be focused on the same few problem areas. With FlexHelp, these issues can be isolated and documented directly at the problem point within the application. This translates into fewer repetitive support calls and improved availability of help desk staff to solve other problems.

Because help desk professionals may not have time to learn complex authoring software or design elaborate help systems, FlexHelp is designed to be fast and easy. Buttons and panels can be added to applications in seconds using drag and drop techniques. Information can be displayed a variety of ways, ranging from simple text or HTML files which may already exist on your intranet—to custom help systems created with Windows Help or HTML Help.

Training Staff

Project Managers

In contrast, FlexHelp can be used to attach virtually any information to specific points within an application, and that information can be updated at any time. This makes it possible to go beyond application help and make information about the current task or project available at convenient points within heavily used applications.

For example, the members of a financial analysis group may spend the majority of their time working with a spreadsheet application. With FlexHelp, the project/group manager can easily provide the entire group with links to up-to-date project/task information from directly within the spreadsheet.

Help Authors/Technical Writers

Prototype help systems

With FlexHelp, the help author can take full control of implementing and testing a prototype context-sensitive help system. The system can be revised as needed and tested for both proper operation and usability without the need to involve the software developers. Once both the software and the help system are stable, the help system can be permanently linked to the application using the traditional method.

Legacy Applications

Add-in/Helper Applications

Alternative/Supplementary Help Systems for 3rd Party Software