Have you ever pressed the ? button in the main ribbon? When you are new to Dynamics 365 you have perhaps clicked on this to check the documentation or when you already work day in and day out with it, perhaps you clicked on this accidentally because you were too quick with clicking and wanted to click on the settings wheel. This happened to me again and that triggered me to investigate what can we actually do with this.
When checking the standard functionality, depending on which app you have open, it will guide you to documentation from Microsoft. For example, when you are in the:
- Sales Hub App, this will bring you to: Dynamics 365 documentation – Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
- Field Service App, this will bring you to: Overview of Dynamics 365 Field Service – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn
How to configure help
One of my first “go-to places” is checking the Settings area of my environment and seeing what settings are available there on this topic. Here, you will find the Help Features section, with the following options:
- Custom help for customizable entities
This allows you to override the default help content as mentioned above. Once enabled you can define the global help URL - Global custom help URL
Once custom help is enabled, this allows you to enter the URL for all customizable record types (tables). Good to know that you override this on the table level which I will touch on a bit later. - Append parameters to URL
Once checked, this allows you to make your Help content more dynamic. For example, you can access parameters for:- User Language Code
- Table Name
- Entry Point (view or form)
- Form ID
The Enable custom help panes setting is disabled since I believe this is not being supported anymore I guess? A couple of years back, this was a functionality that allowed you to embed custom help pages that could contain for example text, video, or images based on the table that you were at. Pretty powerful if you ask me and the blogs/videos about this looked pretty nice so not sure what the reasoning behind this is. If you do know, feel free to drop a message below this post.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, you do have the option to override the global custom help URL by defining the URL on the table level. How to configure help on the table level? Easy, if you navigate to the Settings of your table you can enable the Provide custom help and enter your Help URL.
But now comes the perhaps most difficult part of this, what URL, or in essence, which tool are you using that holds the help, guidance, process documentation, etc? I do not have much experience with this, since I am working for an end-user I also don’t see a lot of other clients to see how and if they adopt the custom help feature.
You could think about the following tools, and all of them have pros and cons I guess when it comes to maintenance of the content, user-friendliness, or how cool it looks:
- Sharepoint
- Youtube
- Website
- Sway
- Other?
To get some inspiration I created one for Big Lex’s Smokehouse; Best BBQ stuff in town using the tool Sway. I would love to hear your feedback and experience when it comes to the custom help functionality and tools you are using.
