NAV 2009 Help Toolkit and Help Source Files Released

Paul_Chapman_[MSFT]

We've released to PartnerSource the Help Toolkit for NAV 2009 and the source files for NAV 2009 Help. We're providing the Help Source to partners so that they can more easily provide custom documentation. The Help Toolkit has been overhauled for NAV 2009 with an improved build tool and documentation. You can find the links to the downloads and read more on the NAV Team Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/archive/2009/02/09/help-toolkit-and-help-source-files-for-microsoft-nav-2009.aspx).

Let us know if you have any feedback!
-Paul Chapman
NAV Doc Manager

jreynolds

I think it's great that you are releasing the help source files. However, I notice from the download site that there are source files for the group 0 and most of the group 1 countries, but there are no source files for the worldwide help. Are you planning on releasing the worldwide source files?

Paul_Chapman_[MSFT]

Good question! We did not release the Help source files for NAV 5.0 W1 either, but we did provide the source for Master.chm in the NAV 5 Help Toolkit. But, just because we haven't released these files in the past doesn't mean we can't going forward.

Are you interested in just the source for Master.chm? Or for all W1 Help files? In what scenarios would you use the W1 source? How would you address the localization issues? For example, the W1 source differs from the EN-US source as the W1 Help is adapted to the US market. If your solution is translated, would you translate your customizations?

-paul

Administrator

[Solved attribute removed by Administrator]

jreynolds

We have developed a vertical add-on product for Dynamics NAV. As part of a multi-national organization we are providing this product to our offices in other countries. As such, we do all of development in the worldwide database. Being in the US we also handle the North American localization of the product. Our offices in other countries that we are working with handle the localization for their market. This includes code changes as necessary as well as translation of captions. 

Part of the development effort is, of course, developing online help. Just like we deliver the W1 code base to our offices in other countries we would like to deliver help files based upon the W1 help source files. These offices are responsible for translating any new help topics that we develop for our product and they are responsible for updating any of the W1 source files that we have modified.

Paul_Chapman_[MSFT]

We have now released the W1 Help source files. They are available from the same PartnerSource page as the localized source files. See http://blogs.msdn.com/nav/archive/2009/02/09/help-toolkit-and-help-source-files-for-microsoft-nav-2009.aspx for the link to the download page.

Please note that if you edit the W1 source files, anyone downstream consuming those customizations will need to deal with the localization issues.

-paul

jreynolds

This is great!

Thanks, Paul.