Help system
The Help system section covers how Business Central help content is written, contributed, configured, and migrated. It answers questions about authoring standards, context-sensitive help properties, hosting custom help, contributing through GitHub, and moving legacy help to the current format.
Path: Get started > Help and support > Help system · tier official · system none · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)
Overview
The Help system section is for people who write, host, or customize help for Business Central. It has five pages: an authoring guide, a page on contributing to the help, two on configuration, and one on migrating legacy help.
Start with the authoring guide if you write content. It covers Markdown syntax, accessibility, metadata, file naming, and the text of tooltips and error messages. “Contribute to the Help” explains the GitHub workflow of forking, editing Markdown, and sending pull requests to Microsoft.
For custom help, use “Configure the Help experience” for deployment to websites, the legacy Help Server, and the BaseHelpUrl setting. Then use “Configure context-sensitive help” to link app and page elements to help through properties. If you have older PDFs, documents, or web content, the migration page explains how to reuse or convert them to Markdown.
Key points
- The authoring guide covers Markdown, accessibility, metadata, file naming, tooltips, and error message text.
- Contributing to the help uses GitHub: fork the repository, edit Markdown, and submit a pull request to Microsoft.
- The contribution page also mentions autogenerated content and a translation service.
- Context-sensitive help is set with the app-level contextSensitiveHelpUrl property and the page-level ContextSensitiveHelpPage property, and it ties into the Help pane.
- The context-sensitive help page also covers the supportedLocales and helpBaseUrl properties and localization of help.
- The Help experience page covers deploying custom help content to websites, including Azure web hosting, and the BaseHelpUrl setting.
- The Help experience page also describes the legacy Help Server and applies to both online and on-premises deployments.
- The migration page covers reusing existing web content and converting PDFs or documents to Markdown, with tooltip support.
Learn pages
- Authoring guide for Business Central: Tips and tricks for authoring in MarkDown files when you extend or customize the Help for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
- Configure context-sensitive help: Learn about how to add context-sensitive help to your Business Central solution, both as an app publisher, an administrator, and as a developer.
- Configure the Help experience: Learn how to give your customers access to the right Help content for Business Central online and on-premises.
- Contribute to the Help: Tips and tricks for working with the GitHub repos and Markdown files for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
- Migrate legacy help to the Business Central format: Reuse your existing Help content from Dynamics NAV or other products, and make it available to your Business Central solution.
- User assistance model: Learn about the user assistance model for Dynamics 365 Business Central and how your solution can comply with it.
Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.