

Building a help system for a saas application. - creativeone

I have the job of building a help system for a not-too-easy-to-use saas application.<p>I am restricted insofar as I cannot make changes to the code or layout of the system.<p>Right now there is a very high learning curve to use the system.<p>Where can i learn about the best practices for explaining how to use an online service?<p>Does an interactive forum outperform a deep FAQ?  Any services, like Zendesk, that you guys recommend?<p>Where should i start?
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etamas
After doing a lot of research and attempted to use many wiki systems, we've
settled to using Wordpress as our help system. It's got decent search,
hierarchical articles that you can easily map into categories, many plugins
and so on.

To accomplish this, we've created a custom theme/layout that renders the help
categories in a JQuery tree plugin on a left sidebar , search on top and
content on the right column.

The effort was about 2-3 days for one frontend developer and the results were
quite good, so I highly suggest going this route unless you have other
restrictions.

