With our upcoming release of Headlight, we want to provide the best possible support to our customers and users. This included a more modern way of looking for help on a website than we have used in the past. This is a brief overview of our new help system, Little Helper.

We had two main objectives with Little Helper

- It should be possible to find help yourself
- The users can suggest other solutions to the problem for others to read.

It became quite clear to us that letting the users interact with each other and suggest alternates solutions to the different help topics were the right way to go. This would over time make Little Helper much, much richer in information than we could ever write our selves, and at the same time provide more solutions to the same problems. This, in essence, puts the user in control and that’s something we believe in.

Dwelling over the idea for a while let to the suggestion that Little Helper should be more than a simple user forum or weblog. It was important that we could integrate the help topics and solutions directly into other software. So, we decided upon the idea of an XML web service API that lets you do just that.

So now we had both the Little Helper website/weblog and the API for integrating in other systems, but we weren’t done just yet. We knew we wanted a category of help topics called Tips & Tricks, which should contain relative short articles with productivity tips and that we wanted to update this category very often. That’s the perfect example of when to use RSS, we thought, so all categories now have its own RSS feed you can subscribe to.

We saw how this type of system could be beneficial to other than us self, and decided to make it open source and share it with anybody who is interested. That, of course, meant that we had to design the system to be easy to understand and use right away by almost anybody. All the data is stored in XML files so you don’t need a certain database installed on your web server in order to use Little Helper. You only need .NET Framework 2.0 installed and you’re ready to go.

The system is up and running right now, but still needs the last overhaul before we release it. Come back to check for the release soon. Little Helper will be free of charge and you can change it in whatever way you want.