Microsoft continues their development of Model-driven apps with the general availability of the Custom Help Pane feature.
What is a Custom Help Pane?
A custom help pane gives the user an in-product solution that can be tailored for their needs. It replaces the previous learning path guided help feature that was used with legacy web client apps and this new feature lets you create custom help text for your application. This can include styling options, formula options, language-specific help and guidance that includes rich text, content links, images, and video links.
What’s new in this experience?
- There is a new floating menu that includes styling options (Bold and Italic) and formula options (curly brackets, strikethrough, subscript, power, and underline).
- Now you can edit links/images/videos/balloons/coach marks with a variety of options available. To edit balloons and coach marks, select the link and find the edit option in the floating menu.
How can I enable help panes?
Firstly, administrator privileges are required to create, read, write, delete, and append help panes. By default, the system administrator and system customizer security roles both have this privilege. Furthermore, to view help panes in an app, a read privilege is also needed. By default, the Help Page Consumer security role will have this privilege, but a basic user security role will not.
- To enable a custom help pane, open a model-driven app and then on the command bar, click Settings > Advanced settings.
- Then select Settings > System > Administration.
- On the Administration page, click System Settings.
- On the General tab, under ‘Set custom Help URL’, select Yes for Enable Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks, and then select OK.
Summary
The introduction of general availability for custom help panes in model-driven apps is another useful update from Microsoft which will help improve the user’s experience within the platform. If you are an existing Strategy 365 client and want to discuss custom help panes with one of our team, please feel free to get in touch.
