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.

Many documents based on files that remain on a desktop file system are subject to error sooner or later. Files in a desktop file system can be deleted or removed accidentally. Data integrity is not guaranteed, and content management becomes expensive and time-consuming with the manual tracking of active links and references.

With HelpServer, however, you can add all kinds of files and folders from your desktop to a central repository and neatly organize them in folder structures in HelpServer's Workbench. The files remain under the control of the integrity mechanism. Active links to files are registered, and files that are no longer referred to are removed automatically.

This a major asset: you do not have to be concerned about what happens with your file references when you move an object from one folder to another since links remain active at all times.

If a file is changed, you simply reload it to the Workbench to refresh the contents in the HelpServer database.

For most types, metadata for search and retrieval is automatically created.

With HelpServer, you are able to control and distribute knowledge in the context of a company’s individual requirements by organizing customer- and business-critical information in an active central repository.

HelpServer’s content-management capabilities are flexible and extendable. You can deliver accurate and consistent information to each department within a company or to any business process that relies on content.

HelpServer’s open standards allow you to build custom integrations. The HelpServer content is accessible over the Internet in real time by means of a URL. Applications can launch a web browser, passing this URL and so pop up the requested content as a web page. Additional parameters in the URL allow the HelpServer server engine to compile the content dynamically and in this way you can provide your users with personalized and up-to-date information.

The biggest problem faced by large organizations with numerous content providers is legacy content. How do you deal with ageing content  with little in the way of central control? HelpServer's authoring tool allows you to convert and load all kinds of content in the HelpServer database.

The HelpServer content can be exported or extracted from the database into a variety of formats:

The export function can be performed in the Workbench by authors but also users who browse information in the web browser can engage the export function. This can be an alternate way to use content when Internet based access to HelpServer’s database is unavailable. Furthermore, if the optional notification system is engaged people can be warned when their offline output has changed so that they can re-export it.

You can import content from files that have the .dita or the .ditamap extension. You can also generate output that produces DITA files. Note however, that HelpServer does not yet validate against the DITA scheme. However, you can use a third party tool such as XMetal to create your structured DITA files.

If you import content from DITA files you can further develop it and generate various types of web-based and print-based output. You can of course send the HelpServer content back out to DITA to import it in another tool.

HelpServer is a multi-lingual authoring environment with double-byte support and fully Unicode content authoring support. Multiple languages can be made available in the same HelpServer installation. The multilingual authoring environment then enables translators to keep all translated topics tightly together to facilitate maintenance.

Documents may combine globalized content with content in a ‘fall back’ language, such as English. If a content object is not available in a specific language then it is automatically replaced by its generic counterpart.

Content can be extracted from the HelpServer platform and then passed to language suppliers or agencies where it is translated. As soon as the translation has finished the translated content can be imported into HelpServer’s workflow.

Structured authoring is a method of writing and arranging content that relies on rules and a way to enforce these rules. It also separates content from structure and presentation. Structured authoring improves the management of information by creating a consistent content structure that is used throughout a document or in a project. This structure helps to create smaller chunks of information that are stored in reusable objects.

In HelpServer you achieve this by defining content architectures and documentation standards through the use of classes.  Once defined, these classes guide content through the development process. This approach may restrict you at first, but it saves time in the end by forcing documentation to be complete, consistent, and designed for re-purposing.

Something that is mentioned a lot is the importance of separating structure from content. Understanding the difference between structure and content can be difficult at first, especially if you're used to not thinking about the semantic structure of a document.

In HelpServer's Workbench you do not work with the actual content objects. Instead, all content objects (folders, topics, etc) you see in the Workbench are in fact references (i.e. links) to content objects. You can compare these references with the shortcuts in Windows Explorer. However, in Windows Explorer you have also access to the actual content objects (the files and the folders) while in the HelpServer Workbench the actual content objects are hidden and are only manipulated by the system.

This approach allows a full separation of structure and content and it makes reusing an object just a matter of copying and pasting. In this sense, you are not just separating things in one place, you are bringing them together in another.

The HelpServer repository is a single web based content source shared by applications, customers, business partners, and authors. You can reuse a content object in several assets without losing visibility of the impact of changing it just by means of a copy/paste or a drag/drop operation. This prevents redundancy and updates to reused content cascade everywhere, ensuring content accuracy for all deliverables. So, people can easily reuse content throughout the entire organization, leveraging existing content in future documents.

In HelpServer your content is stored as objects in a central database. The server manages these objects from creation through destruction. If you add a new object the system allocates the object for you and you actually work with the reference of the new object. If you rearrange objects in a folder you rearrange the references. If you copy or cut an object and then paste it, you paste the reference. And if you remove an object you remove its reference. So, the remove function operates on the reference to a content object and never on the actual content object. If after removal the system detects that there are still references left to the data object then it will not be deleted, only the reference is removed. This approach ensures integrity and eliminates broken links

Although the HelpServer content is very dynamic, it is search engine friendly and it is optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure. If search engine optimization (SEO) is a strong marketing device to you then you can enable search spiders to crawl the content and the HelpServer topics will appear in the search result lists. The access to the found topics is completely handled by HelpServer's server engine. And to effectively protect privileged content we highly recommend the optional extended security feature.

HelpServer fully separates the presentation from the content by means of page styles. This kind of separation lets you factor out repetition and shared aspects, and deal with them just once. In this way controlling the presentation of a document becomes much easier and the same document can be presented in several ways. Even more, every user or group of users can have a specific interface to the same content.

HelpServer's page styles are very flexible, require no scripting or programming skills, and meet the requirements of most help and documentation projects.

HelpServer’s adaptable look and feel enables you to determine the way in which navigation bars, action bars, and the body of all the HelpServer web pages are laid out and presented to the user within his browser window. You can change the background and foreground colors, the font size and style, the icons, and the look of the buttons. You can also add sound effects and animation, select default options, and specify your own custom images.

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.

In HelpServer you can organize your content in projects. Each project is equipped with a project gallery. The project gallery is the place where all images, media files, and snippets are stored. Authors can pop up the gallery and select whatever they need. In this way files and snippets can be reused in multiple topics while they are kept and maintained in the gallery. These project resources can be shared by multiple projects to prevent redundancy and to enhance the reusability.

HelpServer uses a spelling checker equipped with lexicons in American English, British (international) English, Canadian English, German, Spanish, French, and Dutch. These lexicons can be extended by special domain lexicons and customized lexicons.

Scalability is a critical issue since the amount of information in an enterprise increases every year. HelpServer’s underlying architecture is designed to accommodate virtually unlimited growth. If you choose to immediately jump in and take off, you can start with low-budget hard-& software.

Thanks to HelpServer's multi platform technology you can always migrate to other environments and scale to a high-performance infrastructure.

You can create templates to determine the structure, security, style, content, and properties of other objects. The ability to base new objects on a template can be switched on/off in the folder and topic classes. A template can be pre selected in a class or the author can select a template on creation of a new object.

Snippets are pre-set chunks of formatted content that can be reused in topics of a project. This prevents redundancies and errors. Snippets can be suggested while you type. You can also search the content for phrazes and than manually replace a phraze by a snippet or you can simply select a snippet object from the project gallery to insert it in the content.

Users can personalize the information by adding their own comments or notes to a content object, which are then stored in HelpServer’s database. Only the user himself can see and change these notes.

The HelpServer content is accessed in real time over the Internet. HelpServer uses lightweight HTML web pages that conform strictly to W3C recommendations. This means that HelpServer can be used with virtually any commercial browser of recent history. No installation or plug-ins are required.

HelpServer’s interface is by default available in English. But it can be provided in French, German, Dutch, or Japanese, and other languages on request (delivery time is 2 months after request).

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.

As more and more information is available on the web, securing that data becomes increasingly important. In the HelpServer CMS a basic security mechanism handles a common security profile for the entire content collection. In environments where different people have access to the content then different parts of the content might require a distinguished security setup. In that case setting up and maintaining the security can become a burden for your business. And that's where HelpServer's extended security feature comes in.

This feature allows the set up of multiple security profiles necessary to control the access to content for different kinds of user communities and/or authors. Each security profile grants the required permissions to the user accounts and is attached to a specific project or a subset of the content objects. The result is a security model that becomes transparent for the administrator and hence easier to maintain and to extend.

Furthermore, the extended security supports features such as smartcontent and notification.

Distributed systems and web applications are becoming more and more common-place as people demand the flexibility of ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to their content. HelpServer's browser-based authoring feature provides an easy and distributed environment for creating and maintaining content without requiring you to install anything on your desktop. It allows you to invoke HelpServer's authoring tool, the Workbench, in your web browser, you author as with a traditional desktop authoring tool while your work is stored in the HelpServer central repository.

Combining a browser-based authoring client with a server based architecture enables true collaborative development from anywhere in the world. Combined with full authoring capabilities, it provides huge time and cost savings. It allows you to change topics displayed in the web browser ‘on the spot’ simply by switching to HelpServer’s edit mode. This allows immediate reactions to sudden, perhaps temporary conditions.

With HelpServer's workflow mechanism administrators define the flow of tasks to be performed on the content objects. People who need to perform a task indicate whether the task is completed, rejected, or skipped which then triggers a transition of other tasks to be performed, usually by other people. If the notification feature is acquired then on each task transition notification messages are sent to the contributors of a project so that the right people immediately know when to start their work.

The workflow contributors can generate task lists which tell them exactly what tasks to perform in which part of the project. As soon as the entire workflow is finished the project can be released and the workflow stops.

HelpServer’s versioning system enables you to save and to restore older copies of content. The moment a content object becomes active due to the publish process you can wrap it up in a new version. It is then tagged with a timestamp and you can provide a version number or a name and a comment. The trail of previous versions is preserved and can be tracked, viewed, restored, or removed. The versioning mechanism can be enabled for the entire project or for specific content objects. It can be engaged manual or it can be included as the final step in the publishing process.

Notifications inform people about the occurrence of an event in a CMS. Such an event can be for example a change to the content, feedback that was added, or a request to contribute in the workflow. Notification will enable or force people to perform the correct tasks and make decisions.

Users, authors, and administrators have an inbox to hold messages from the notification system. These messages suggest what to do when an event has occurred for example reading the content, reviewing it, translating it, re-exporting it, or reading the feedback.

If you have acquired workflow management, feedback, or annotations consider acquiring this feature. It will turn out to be a valuable asset.

Users, authors, and administrators are able to add their feedback to any folder or topic (e.g. an entire book, a specific chapter in the book, a specific topic in a chapter). This can be performed while browsing content on the web and when working on the content in the Workbench. To encourage the usage the feedback pane in the browser can be visualized in a separate pane on the right of the folder or the topic.

If the notification feature is active then authors can ask the system for notification when someone adds a feedback item to a folder/topic and users can request notification when someone replies to their feedback.

HelpServer allows reviewers and approvers of a project to add annotations to topics and folders. These are comments and remarks that editors can use to correct and to improve the content. If the notification feature is acquired the authors can receive messages in their inbox as soon as someone adds an annotation.

HelpServer’s auditing facilities enable an administrator or auditor to verify the actions performed on the content over a period of time. This allows him to answer questions such as ‘Who is using which content?’, ‘What is the authoring activity on a content object?’, ‘What actions did an author perform on the content?’, etc…

Metadata are field/value combinations that are attached to content so that it can more easily be managed, retrieved, and searched for. Those fields/values are defined by the administrator and linked to the object classes.

When authors add new content objects they can be prompted to assign or select values for one or more of the fields. Some of those values can be assigned automatically. If allowed, the metadata can be changed in the content object properties afterwards.

The ticketing mechanism assigns a unique number to new folders and topics. This number can then be used as reference in for example customer support related content. The format of the ticket number can be fully customized. You can enable the ticketing for an entire project or for different parts of it.

HelpServer Assist is a feature to guide users as they do their work on web applications. As the user moves through a web application, HelpServer Assist displays vital information in a separate help pane. This help pane is a central location for help and support services, for troubleshooting and tutorials.

In addition, as the mouse moves over important fields in the application, contextual information appears automatically as a tooltip over the field.