If you've been using or demoing Guided Help on Vista's Beta and RC builds, you will probably have noticed that it's not appearing in help search results on RTM. Here's what's going on: Executive Summary : It'll be back again in January (in time for...

We started with a basic goal of the feature: Create help content that can either do the steps for the user, or show the user how to do it himself. That sure sounds like a good idea, but lots of things sound good. How do you know that it's a good idea? One big way to find out if it works is usability testing. ...

Hey folks. My name is Kevin Feige and I'm the Test Lead for Guided Help. Our team tests all aspects of Guided Help to make sure everything works as expected under all sorts of conditions. One question that will come up as our customers author their...

I'm starting up a series about authoring a Guided Help topic today. You can see the video here or on soapbox (below). Video: Authoring a Guided Help topic The authoring tools are available as part of the OPK (a toolkit for OEMs that I know relatively...

Here's a fun review of ACW. PS. I'm going to put together a post that covers the authoring experience soon (as it stands today). James Guided Help - You following yet? Guided help is a real gem. When it kicks in using a ’show me’ button...

There's a cool screen capture video of Guided Help in action. I haven't seen these blogcasts a lot before, but they're pretty cool - maybe we'll have to do some. I'm tickled by the phrase "virtual whiz-kid" - that's definitely how I'd like users to feel...

Perhaps in response to our hints at plans to release Guided Help for use by ISVs, we were recently asked about what is necessary to prepare an existing Windows XP application to use Guided Help for its own features. Well, probably nothing at all. ...

We were looking at the surveys coming back from the support version of Guided Help and were really delighted to see that we're making people's computers easier to use. I love the impact of working at Microsoft. I've included a few choice quotes below...

Lots of folks have been wondering about a Guided Help SDK. One thing that's very important about Guided Help topics is that they're inexpensive to create - we have a fairly rough SDK that makes this easy (even easier once the products involved ship)....

They love it . :) To respond to the question of whether or not we'll be adding more topics: We will be adding more topics mostly though our online help (secured of course) and continuous publishing (via Windows Update, IIRC). But also check out what we...

Guided Help is not only a Windows Vista product, it's also being used by Microsoft's support website to help people complete the steps in a kb article. We no longer tell folks to whip out regedit and check a registry key or search their harddrive for...

Hi there, I'm kicking things off here for the team. My name is James Finnigan and I'm a developer on Guided Help. We have a few people on the team and you'll probably get to know them more as they post in this space. Now that beta 2 is out there and...