At the suggestion of Gary Dickelman and Hal Christensen, I’ve decided to give ActiveGuide a whirl. It looks like a great tool for building performance support, including wizards and interactive guides as well as more traditional help, right into web sites and web apps. The authoring tool can read DOM code and recognize the controls on the web page(s) you are working with, which means that you can use ActiveGuide to actually manipulate (or turn off) the controls on the web page for the user. The output from the tool is Javascript which works with any modern browser. Sweet.
Some time over the next couple of weeks, I’ll create a couple of demos and put them on the site. Also, if my good friends at e-Learn Magazine are willing, I’ll write up a review. In the meantime, I’ll post my observations up here.
You can download a free evaluation copy yourself at http://www.rocketools.com/infoREADER.