How to Use the Custom Site Collection Help Feature in SharePoint 2013, Part 3 of 3: Configuring Help Settings

How to Use the Custom Site Collection Help Feature in SharePoint 2013, Part 3 of 3: Configuring Help Settings

by | Aug 27, 2013 | SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Solutions

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Did you know that not only can you customize your SharePoint 2013 site theme, but you can also customize your site collection’s help content?  With the custom Site Collection Help feature, you can create a new system Help Library that can be used to store custom help for a particular site collection.  The Site Collection Help Library can quickly and easily be created by the Site collection administrator, who likewise has control over the content that is added and displayed in the help section.

Now that you have created your Site Collection Help Library in part one, and added content to your Help Library in part two, here in part our three-part series, we’ll show you how to configure the settings of your custom Site Collection Help Feature.

Configure Help Settings for Custom Site Collection Help:

  • To open the configurations settings menu for your Site Collection Help feature, go to the Site Settings for the Site Collection whose settings you will be adjusting, and click Help settings:
  • From here, you will see a list of different Help collections. To make a Help Collection available for your Site Collection, check the checkboxes under Specify the Help collections that you want to make available that are applicable to the site collection. Note that you can click Select All to make all of the Help Collections available:

Use the Custom Help Feature on your site:

  • From your SharePoint site, click on the Help button located on the right side of your site:
  • A dialog box will appear that contains all of the custom Help collections that you applied to the Site Collection:

Check out the rest of the series:

Theo wrote re: How to Use the Custom Site Collection Help Feature in SharePoint 2013, Part 3 of 3: Configuring Help Settings

on Fri, Sep 6, 2013, 11:16 AM

In SP 2010, I used to install my custom help (a cab and a manifest.xml file). I assume that with this change, I will have to provide the help in HTML format to be able to install it as described here, correct?

Thanks.
Asif Rehmani wrote re: How to Use the Custom Site Collection Help Feature in SharePoint 2013, Part 3 of 3: Configuring Help Settings on Tue, Jan 19 2016 2:18 PM

You can definitely add to the help content that’s available default in SharePoint. Unfortunately, the problem remains the same – if it’s not context-sensitive to users, they will just never find it.

Another option is to provide context-sensitive help to SharePoint users right within the interface.

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