Once you decide to deploy content for in-application support, some of the fundamental questions that need to be addressed are:
What deployment mechanism is most appropriate for your application, Help Integration with a target application, SmartHelp-based deployment, or both?
Who needs to be involved, what needs to be done, and when does it have to happen?
Understanding the answers to these questions will give you the information you need to implement help integration and context-sensitive help successfully.
These are the tasks which need to be completed to successfully deploy in-application support.
Content Author
Create content in the Developer: While context for many applications will be automatically captured, it is recommended that you validate that context is being captured. You can check this by opening the topic in the Topic Editor and then opening the Context ID editor. If the Type field displays SmartMatch or ExactMatch, context was captured. If it displays NoMatch, no context was captured. In addition, while you are recording a topic, there is an icon in the Recorder which shows context recognition status.
Create an IAS Configuration document in the Developer: Consult with the application and content web server administrators to find out the necessary URLs.
Give the published content to the web server administrator, or publish the content to Knowledge Center.
Web Server Administrator
Deploy the published content to a web server.
Application Administrator
Perform the configuration steps detailed in this guide for each application.
Receive the content URL from the web server administrator. If the content has been published and deployed to the web server, the iasinfo.html page in the deployed content can be launched to get the URLs which must be configured on the server.
Perform help integration steps for URL configuration, if applicable.
Test User
Verify the published content appears from the application using the Help Integration option or SmartHelp.
If you are deploying context-sensitive help, the test user should coordinate with the content developer to note which parts of the application were used to create content and then verify that the content launches with an appropriate list of relevant topics.