Enter the HelpServer cloud to manage and publish your web based content

HelpServer is a multi-platform, web-based solution to manage enterprise content. Teams of authors can create structured content in reusable and shareable objects. This enables them to keep up with the growth of information in easy to maintain projects. These projects can support documentation management, knowledge management, content management, or context-sensitive application help.

HelpServer is designed to access content in real time over the Internet. The HelpServer content objects remain in a database on a web server. People all over the world can access the content in real time over the Internet. Security and integrity are completely handled by HelpServer's server engine. Authors activate new content and changes to existing content by means of a click.

SaaS or Software as a Service is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor and made available to customers over the Internet. In other words, the software is not hosted on the customers' individual computers.

Under the HelpServer SaaS model the vendor, 4.ST, is responsible for the creation, updating, and maintenance of the HelpServer CMS software. You, the customer, buy a subscription to access it, which includes a separate license, or seat, for each concurrent author that will use the software. The number of seats can be increased as your business grows. This is usually faster and cheaper than purchasing another license and adding it to another computer, as with traditional software.

Choosing the HelpServer SaaS model has great benefits.

SaaS is becoming an increasingly prevalent delivery model as underlying technologies that support Web services and service-oriented architecture ( SOA ) mature and new developmental approaches become popular. Meanwhile, broadband service has become increasingly available to support user access from more areas around the world.

HelpServer offers a unique feature to deliver the right content to the right people over the web. It is called 'Smartcontent' and it is the most important feature of the HelpServer software. The concept is about real-time personalized dynamic content for users. There is no need to write scripts nor are any programming skills required. Instead, the dynamic character of the content in HelpServer relies on conditions defined in the system. These conditions can for example be based on an enterprise’s business units, or the roles people have in a company, or the experience level people have in performing a task.

Authors create content that relates to all the conditions. Even small pieces of text or one or more paragraphs that need to be displayed or printed conditionally can be marked with special tags that for example represent different audience segments. All content is nicely kept together in HelpServer's Workbench to facilitate maintenance and translation.

When people browse the content the HelpServer server engine evaluates the condition by means of settings in the user profile, the occurrence of predefined events, or variable/value pairs entered in the URL or provided by an exit routine. Next, the server dynamically compiles the chunks of content that match with the result of the conditions. And in this way, people can browse, export, or print their preferred content without having to hunt for it.

This feature was created for authors. It does not require any technical skills. So, there is no downtime waiting for scriptwriters to get the job done. Anyone with basic word processing skills can create dynamic content. Armed with the ability to easily deploy content in the user's own language, authors can now focus on content creation instead of on management and formatting activities.

Note however that HelpServer's Smartcontent feature is a mean to support preferred content for your user community. It is not a mean to secure the content, though. To effectively and easily secure content for people with different needs it is recommended to acquire HelpServer's extended security feature.

HelpServer provides a team-authoring environment that uses a shared, object-based content database that provides excellent support for day-to-day collaborative authoring activities. A virtual unlimited number of authors can use HelpServer's Workbench in team to create, maintain, translate, review, and publish content in real time over the Internet.

The HelpServer Workbench uses an automatic check out/check in procedure with exclusive locks for editing. Authors simply cannot work concurrently on the same object. While an author makes changes, others are only able to view the changed object. When the author has finished, he can release the object(s) for use by others.

In addition the browser-based authoring feature allows you to work on your content from anywhere, with any workstations with Internet connectivity.