Brings more visitors to your web site

• Your help will be available to all the spiders and crawlers. They are automatically provided with ‘scriptless’ version of TOC. This ensures the whole help will be indexed. See http://help.x-tensive.com/PlainToc.aspx.

Makes your visitors happier

• Professional help browser adds valuable mark to overall user experience. Help Server brings well-known user interface to the web charging it with AJAX. It is compatible with all leading browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.
• Keyword index and full-text search relying on Lucene.Net allow users to get the help faster.

Integration

• You’re still thinking how to integrate help into your web application, conceptual documentation or Wiki? Help Server provides URL API allowing to navigate to a specified topic, keyword or full-text search result. Check out DataObjects.Net Wiki for examples of such integration.
• Help Server UI is built with a set of its own ASP.NET controls. All these controls as well as all .aspx pages using them are shipped with full source code, so it’s possible to customize almost any part of UI. The only closed part is HelpEngine used by these controls – it’s shipped as a set of assemblies.

Customization

• Logo and all visible strings and messages are fully customizable (some of such for licensed users only)
• 2 skins are bundled into installation package: one is similar to new MSDN Library Viewer (grey), another is close to Office 2007 (blue)
• Config.xml file allows to join multiple .Chm, .HxS and HTML files into the global table of contents.

High availability

• Help Server provides HTTP caching headers allowing browsers to aggressively cache help content. This positively affects both on user experience and web server load.
• Zero downtime on updates of help files in the runtime, or the whole collection of them! Such updates may continue for many hours – client will be able to browse old help collections until it’s finished, and will notice the update only by tree refresh on the next subsequent request. The moment of help update completion is determined automatically by a delay passed after last update in ‘Resources’ folder.
• Extremely large help collections are supported. Our own help contains about 50000 topics, and it easily handles it. Browsing a collection of 100000-1000000 documents shouldn’t be a problem at all.