This is an interesting blog by Marc D Anderson. Marc is an MVP and has over 25years in technology professional services and software development.

In a recent client project, we wanted to offer some sort of online help capability. While SharePoint has a help capability built into it (those little  icons on every page which usually take you to a page that has nothing to do with what you are actually doing – Microsoft should really fix that), we wanted something a bit different.

In this case, we were using SharePoint uniquely. Without going into all of the specifics, we were using SharePoint as the new front end to a long-standing existing system which was built with .NET on top of SQL. We were going to have hundreds of sites, if not thousands, with every site having exactly the same pages.

The way this worked was that we set up about 20 different page layouts. Each of those page layouts would be used by exactly one page in each site, and we controlled the names of all of the pages. At least in the near- to mid-term, end users wouldn’t be creating pages of their own. SharePoint would not be used to any significant degree for its collaboration capabilities, but as a way to “Webify” the existing application relatively easily.

There are some other really interesting and cool aspects to what we did, but in this post, I want to focus just on the simple help system we built.

Rather than using a publishing model, we decided to use a list to hold the help content. I’m a *huge* fan of list-based content over the publishing model for most internal systems. It gives you the possibility of reusing the same content in multiple ways using different delivery channels far more easily. There are those who think otherwise, but there you go. It always depends.

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