Helpdesk's Adviser (Ratgeber fr Benutzerservice)
Helmut Zinn, IG Metall, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The Helpdesk Adviser is a collection of tools to support the work at a help desk. Many questions come up repeatedly and therefore we collect questions and answeres and organize them by creating a subdirectory for every group of problem.

There are two possibilities to open a document in BlackBox: 1st in browser mode (StdCmds.OpenBrowser) and 2nd in edit mode (StdCmds.OpenDoc). We need both to edit and view documents respectively. When following links, the new document should be opened in the same mode as the current one is in. Therefore, a simple
extension was easily defined and quickly programmed: the new command InfoCmds.OpenDoc.

The Helpdesk Adviser was copied to our department server. As the adviser grows, it becomes more and more cumbersome to copy all documents to the server every day. Hence, we created a BlackBox program called Update, which can compare two directory trees and list all the files that were changed, added, or deleted.
Based on this list, we can run an update to copy exactly new files and those that were changed. Old files, no longer existing in the original, are deleted.

Recently, a cross-reference builder, a search module, and a check link module have been added.

Now we are working on a HTML importer and exporter. All tags that are not translated are in a tag view. The tag views can be created, expanded, collapsed, shown and hidden.

The Helpdesk Adviser is in use since October 1996. Today (5th September 2000) it manages about 1700 documents.
