Customize Help

Web sites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services are fully customizable — you can add any type of Web page to the site, and all kinds of interactive content to the pages. To complement this flexibility in the site, the Help system for Windows SharePoint Services was designed to be customizable. So, when you customize the pages available on a Web site, you can also customize the Help available for those pages by adding topics that contain information specific to your organization.

For example, you might want to add topics to Help when:

• You change the behavior of a default Web site page and want to explain how users can interact with the modified page.
• You add a new page to the site with a form that users must fill out and you want to provide assistance for particular fields in the form.
• You want to explain your organization's Web site policies, processes, or structure to new users of the site.

You must have administrator rights to the server computer to add topics to the Windows SharePoint Services Help system.

Adding topics to Help

You can use any level 4 HTML-compatible Web page editor, such as Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, to create topics. When you add a topic, be sure to edit the table of contents topic to include the new file, and also create a hyperlink in the index topic to link to important terms in the new topic.

Windows SharePoint Services stores Help content as HTML and image files in the file system of the server computer. Windows SharePoint Services stores these files per server, so when you add a Help topic, it is available for all users of that server. The following table lists and describes the contents of the folders used to store Help content on a server.

About the Windows SharePoint Services Help folder and security

Because the Windows SharePoint Services Help topics take advantage of Microsoft JScript code to control some Help features, the \_vti_bin\help\lcid\sts\ folder that contains the Windows SharePoint Services Help files grants Read and Read and Execute permissions to the Everyone group. It is recommended that you control access to this folder and any other installation folders for Windows SharePoint Services. Because of the Read and Execute permission, a user with Write permissions to this folder could potentially add malicious scripting to files in the folder, which would then be allowed to run.

Customizing special Help files

The Help system for Windows SharePoint Services consists of Help topic files plus special files such as the table of contents, index, glossary, and other files. When you add custom content to the Help system, consider updating these special files as well to contain references to your new content.

Finding specific Help files

You can find topics in the Help system by browsing through the table of contents. After you identify the topic you want, you can turn on the Address bar for the Help window to identify the path to the topic. To do this in Microsoft Internet Explorer, on the View menu, click Toolbars, and then click Address Bar. Alternatively, you can use the search feature included with Microsoft Windows operating system to search through the _vti_bin\lcid\sts\html folder to find a particular sentence or phrase in Help.

Performing advanced customization of Help

You can also perform more advanced customization of the Help system. For example, each default page has one or more unique Help topics associated with it. These associations are maintained in a table in the Help ASPx home page. By editing this table, you can make your custom Help topics appear in the list of context-sensitive topics for a particular page in your Web site. For more information about advanced customization of Help, see the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Software Development Kit.

Preserving customized Help when installing service releases

Windows SharePoint Services service releases often contain updated Help files. If you customize a default Help topic, and then apply a service release, Windows SharePoint Services may overwrite the customized version of the Help file.

Note  Because service releases update default Help topics, it is not recommended that you customize the default Help topics, aside from the table of contents and index files.

If you are customizing the Help system extensively, it is recommended that you back up your customized topics before applying a service release, so that you can restore your customizations after the service release is installed.