Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks for Unified Interface Apps

Do any of you remember learning path that is available in the legacy interface in Dynamics 365? I didn’t really get to work with it, as I found it was a little clunky. For those who don’t know what this is, let me try to explain how it worked; when a user clicked on the help button in the user interface inside of Dynamics 365, a help pane opened up next to the screen the user was working in, directly inside of Dynamics 365. This pane could have all different types of help information, like videos, images, links, etc. When I tried to add learning path to the unified interface I found (to my disappointment) that this was not a feature that was available for the unified interface.
Guess what? We now have something similar called ‘Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks’ that we can use in the unified interface! I believe it’s still in preview, but that shouldn’t stop any of us from playing around with it to get more familiar with the controls available! Lets take a look!

Note: The custom help panes functionality is not the same as learning path but it does replace the previous learning path guided learning feature used with legacy web client apps.

Keep in mind that in order to start authoring custom help panes, you need to be on version 9.1.0.10300 or later. You also need a security role that has global ‘create’, ‘write’, ‘delete’, ‘append’ and ‘append to’ privileges on the Help Page entity. This entity is listed under the custom entities page on the security role form. Before we can start working with Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks, we need to enable this functionality the environment. In order to do that, navigate to the gear icon on the top right, then click on ‘Advanced Settings’. From there you need to navigate to ‘Administration’ and open the ‘System Settings’. Under the ‘General’ tab, there is a section that is called ‘Set custom Help URL’, we want to set ‘Enable Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks’ to yes as shown in the screenshot below. Keep in mind that you can only use Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks or custom help (Use custom help for customizable entities), you can’t enable both at the same time.

We can create context sensitive help content for different contexts where every help pane is unique:

• Unified Interface App
• Entity
• Form
• Language

Create Content

In order to start creating help content, open a custom canvas app in Dynamics 365. (Unfortunately I noticed we can’t create Custom Help Panes and Guided Tasks for ‘System Apps’, like the Sales Hub or the Project Automation App today; this is a bug and should be fixed in April 2020.)
Click on the question mark icon on the top right of the screen. A panel will open up on the right side of the screen with no content. Click on the ellipse to get to the menu, then click edit. If you want to edit exisitng

When the screen opens in edit mode, you can start adding content to the pane. From here you have the ability to add a title and text to the help pane. You can use the format options visible on the edit screen: bold, italic, underline, strike-through, bulleted list, and numbered list.
The insert tab has options for admins to add other components to the help page. The different options that are available are:

• Sections – Text boxes which can be collapsed by default or not. Sections can be used to group items together. We can enter text or links in sections.
• Images – This allows admins to add images to the help pane. In order to add an image to the help pane users will need to enter a URL.
• Videos – This options embeds a playable video into the help pane. Just like images, admins need a URL in order to add video content. They also have the option to configure to allow full screen viewing and/or auto play. The start time of the video can also be configured. Supported video sources are :Microsoft Stream, Youtube, Facebook and Vimeo.
• Links – This embeds a link to a web page, so admins need to enter a URL when adding this to the help pane. Today Admins don’t have the option to link to an existing help page, but this feature is coming.
• Coach Marks – These can be used to highlight specific areas in the user interface.
• Balloons – These are the same as coach marks, the difference is that a balloon can have text in it which coach marks don’t have.

Coach marks and balloons can be linked to text so when a user clicks on the text, the coach mark or balloon appears on the user interface.

Move Help Content

It’s interesting to know that each time you create a new help pane, the system creates a Help Page record in Dynamics 365, which makes it easy for us to move the content to a different instance! (Feel free to do an advanced find for ‘Help Page’ records in Dynamics 365 after you configured one!) Even though we’re creating records in Dynamics 365, we won’t import these records into a Dynamics 365 instance, like we normally do with record data. We can move our help pages by creating a solution and adding the help pages as components to the solution. To add a help page to a solution, open the solution and click ‘Add Existing’ and select ‘Help Pages’ from the drop down. This will open the ‘Select Solution Components’ window, from which you can select the help pages you want to include in your solution.

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