Kurt Shintaku's Blog

One of the coolest features of Windows Vista is "Guided Help".  It’s a feature that enables the computer to literally, step-by-step, show the individual how to accomplish a task that they look up in Windows Vista’s Help system.

WINDOWS VISTA… ASSISTS USERS WITH GUIDED HELP!
The OS actually takes control of your mouse, moves the pointer, and clicks on the display to open windows, select features, and basically show the user how to do what it is they want.

There’s a demonstration of this feature in this video here:
http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: COOL! Vista Guided Help Demonstration

Wanna try it yourself?  It’s easy.  Let’s say you want to have the "My Computer" icon on your desktop like in Windows XP but you can’t figure out how.

1. Go to START and click HELP & SUPPORT.
2. In the SEARCH HELP field at the top, type "show desktop icons".
3. Select "Show or hide common icons on the desktop (Guided Help)" from the list of possible results.
4. Select "Do it automatically" and watch Windows perform your task for you.

EXPANDING THE LIBRARY OF GUIDED HELP FOR WINDOWS VISTA
The question I get from IT professional types immediately after showing this feature is, can we expand the library of guided help in Windows Vista and the answer is yes.  As a matter of fact, if you want to expand your library, there already are additional Guided Help modules you can download from Microsoft Support. 

For example:  Let’s say you wanted to disable 3rd party tool bands in Internet Explorer like the Google Toolbar or Yahoo Toolbar.  You would find this KB article available:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298931

In this article is a link to a downloadable executable that adds a Guided Help module to your Windows Vista system that walks you through the process of disabling 3rd party tool bands.

Here’s at least 30 or so other downloadable Guided Help modules available:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?catalog=LCID%3D1033&spid=global&query="guided+help"&adv=&mode=r&cat=False

CREATING YOUR OWN GUIDED HELP FOR WINDOWS VISTA
Next question is always, "How do I create my OWN Guided Help?"  Good question.  It turns out that there’s a tutorial on how to do this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/activecontentwizard/archive/2006/08/25/Authoring-a-Guided-Help-topic.aspx

And in the tradition of the Guided Help team, they have a nice video on how to build a Guided Help topic: 

AND NOW, SOME COMMENTARY… JUST BECAUSE I CAN
What’s really sick is that we had this technology back in 1989.  It was called Visual Test which was basically a companion product to Visual Basic and the other Visual development tools we had. 

We sold it off a development tools firm later on, probably because it was a bit ragged at the edged and originally created to just be a regression testing tool we built internally and just designed to package up and monetize.  I should know:  I bought the thing while I worked for Hewlett Packard back in the days when it was all about Windows 2.0 & Windows 386.

But it worked.  You could create and record your own "script" simply by moving your mouse around, typing on the keyboard, and having Visual Test record and macro-ize everything you were doing, so that you could edit the script then play it all back.  It was pretty impressive actually:  You could record scripts on the basis of windows/object names (so that the windows didn’t have to be exactly in the same spot over and over again) or you could record them on the basis of absolute location on the display, meaning everything had to be in exactly the right location.And you could compile the script into an .EXE so that it could be distributed and used against any test system.

And here we are, in 2007, slapping the name "Active Content Wizard" or something like that, and putting the damned automation engine into Windows.  WELL IT’S ABOUT TIME.