Context sensitive help in SharePoint

Context sensitive help is key part of any product now Days. Product companies don’t want their customers to search for a particular help in entire help system and it becomes really difficult in case of online help where you may want to redirect your customer to some online help article

You must have seen such scenarios in many Microsoft products. The one I can remind now is code analysis tool or FxCop
Below is the sample steps of context sensitive help implemented in a SharePoint product, which can be implemented in ASP.NET or any other technology

Step 1: define a content placeholder in master page of the application (as top right corner the default location in SharePoint)

Step 2: now from each page add an image button on which you will attach a javascript function to call help page. Add any standard help image on this button

Step 3: prepare an xml file on which define key value pair for each page.where key will be the page context and value will be the respective URL

Step 4: onload of each page attach a java script function to help image button onclick event which will find the URL from defined xml file

Step 5: prepare a separate help system such as .chm file and publish help content as per the associated links

Step 6: host all the pages in the web server incase of SharePoint I posted all these files which include .htm\.jpg\.css etc in a form library

Step 7: run the application and you will be able to access your help system in context of the current page

I will post the respective code for this soon
Reach me for more detail explanation.