The inside story of the Help function, or the ugly side of configurability

Submitted by: Frans Vanhaelewijck on 24 March 2009

Comments: 0

TenForce has been built from the ground up with ‘powerful configuration options’ in mind. This enables us to deploy one (1!) standard version across a wide variety of industries like publishing, banking, discrete and process manufacturing and services. Yet, this also has its drawbacks as was recently painfully illustrated by the development of our online help system.

As an engineering team, we have made the often difficult decisions to create a solution that has powerful configuration options. Some clear examples are:
 

  • workspaces and lists are created on the fly,
  • fields on detail pages can be switched on or off and repositioned at will,
  • new fields of any type can be added to any list,
  • extra tabs can be created to mimic paper forms,
  • workflow steps are created on the fly along with its authorizations.

 

One of consequences of this approach is that when customer A is looking at the TenForce installation of Customer B, he or she often does not recognize that this is in fact the same application.

Recently we have delivered an integrated online help system. Early tests at our customers quickly learned us that most of the standard help is in fact useless in specific customer situations. Customers typically want to have help texts that are specific for the business processes they have modeled in TenForce. 

 036 Pick your columns

So we came up with a two step approach:
 

  • If on a given location, a customer specific help is available, that help is shown. Typically we develop training material only once and generate from the training material the necessary PDF files to be handed out, and the online help files.
  • If no such specific help is available, we revert back to the standard help.

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