What you installed is what you see: help navigation in modular software products

As software becomes increasingly modular and componentized, giving users more control over what components they install and use, the challenge of creating useful, task-based navigation hierarchies becomes more complex. Help navigation needs to reflect the tasks a user can actually perform, given the components that were installed. This presents organizational and writing challenges for writers and technical challenges for help delivery systems. This paper examines a number of existing and possible future ways of implementing document navigation in a componentized software product and recommends approaches for future projects.