James Finnigan : Guided Help

Bernie Klinder ♡ Guided Help

jamesfinnigan — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:55:38 GMT

From Bernie's review of Windows Vista's killer features...

Guided Help and Automated Diagnostics -- A large number of help desk calls are for simple technical issues that aren't difficult to resolve but are somewhat time consuming to explain to a remote non-technical user. Network issues, printing issues and device drivers are common scenarios that Windows Vista will automatically attempt to fix. Many other common issues are handled via a Guided Help menu that pops up when an error occurs – prompting users to resolve the issue themselves with help from the OS. For IT professionals, performance monitoring and task management tools are easier to use and provide more information.

Also in the list:

Integrated Search
Power Management
Network Management
Ad Hoc Wireless
Presentation Mode (AWESOME)
Previous Versions
Mobility Center
Document Previews
Guided Help and Automated Diagnostics
Aero

Thanks Bernie - glad you like it!

[via Developing for .NET]

Sabarinath Nair reviews Guided Help, Vista

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 10:37:00 GMT

Sabarinath had this to say about Guided Help:

Guided Help

While this feature is still under beta, I believe this would be an interesting feature to have. In addition to having descriptive help files, Guided Help teaches you visually how to do the tasks. It also allows you to record steps, from which you can build your own guided help for your application.

Thanks for reviewing Guided Help and thanks for your desire to have Guided Help move from beta to product. Good news - Guided Help is no longer in beta. Guided Help has shipped both as part of Windows Vista and as part of http://support.microsoft.com/. There are lots of interesting next steps for Guided Help (it's not "done"), but we are out of beta and into customers hands.

Also, it's not generally intended for consumers to author your own guided help content (or even most ISVs - I talked about this in my first post about authoring guided help topics.). Still, this is definitely an interesting direction.

As for the rest of Vista - I have difficulty articulating how many new features there really are. Some of my favorites include Search, DVD Maker, Networking analysis, security improvements galore, ... really just tons of stuff. Just start exploring - the photo gallery stuff is great. Well, I'm a technology geek, but when my wife asked me to upgrade our other home computer to Vista it really showed me how much she appreciates that it's better (and not just the freecell game ;) ). Unfortunately, I declined because it's a bit of a gutless machine (900mhtz) that trudges along on XP and is only upgradable to 512 meg of RAM - XP is snappier at that level of memory than Vista. But Vista performs better in my experience above that threshold than XP.

Well thanks for taking the time to review Vista - I think it's a great product. I understand your frustration with increasing software demands on hardware, but there are a lot of improvements particularly in the area of security, reliability and graphics that lead to this. I would also like to see more work on improving the performance in the next version because I think that we can still do quite a bit better, but it's a complex problem.

Screencast: Video of a few Guided Help Topics running.

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:06:00 GMT

So Andrew, went through and put together a screencast of a few of the Guided Help topics in action. If you look carefully you can even see a few stupid ACW tricks - maybe I'll do a stupid ACW tricks screencast at some point. Anyway, I've included the soapbox version, but I'll probably try to also put up the full wmv because soapbox doesn't allow us the resolution that we'd like.

Video: Selected Guided Help Topics

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