Where Has All the Help Gone?!

Years ago it was considered if not horribly important at least a popular notion that software should include "help" documentation that was ... well... helpful...

What happened to this notion? Why is it no longer possible to get helpful help from the help feature in an application?

It used to be that in Microsoft's Enterprise manager I could open help, search for a keyword and if I didn't find it immediately at least I was directed to a copy of the Books Online (BOL) that had been installed on my machine with the client tools. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for "livedocs" and central wikis, they're awesome for centralizing knowledge for a given technology. The ColdBox wiki is pretty thorough, as is the Transfer wiki -- the community is doing a good job of banding together and making information generally available.

No, I'm talking about the efforts of companies like Microsoft in particular (I'm sure I've seen others), where attempts to centralize documentation end up just making things worse than they were before. Take for example, the management tools for SQL Server I mentioned before. I used to be able to hit the "help" menu and get help. NOT ANYMORE! Microsoft has decided to step up into a bold new horizon of tomorrow's software, where requesting help from within an application sends you to a central repository of information for EVERYTHING!

So I hit the "help" menu and first I'm accosted with a dialog box with a series of 3 radio buttons to choose from, only... wait... TWO of the THREE options available to me have been DISABLED! So I'm being asked to make a selection - I can go to their central repository or I can go to their central repository! Wow! So many options! I think I'll go to their central repository. There I'm given a set of frames that do vaguely resemble the old-style help application, just minus the help. In the upper left corner where I'm hoping to see a "search" option or some way to enter a phrase or keywords I see "Filtered by" with a drop-down. I open the drop down and notice ther'es only 1 option labeled "unfiltered". Wow! I can choose between unfiltered help and unfiltered help! So many options! I think I'll get unfiltered help. Below this is a tree of items regarding "help on help (Microsoft Document Explorer Help)" ... umm... What happened to help applications being intuitive? Why do I need help to use the help application?

So finding no help there I move on to the panel on the right where I find they've opened a browser window for me... There's a URL at the top showing me that I'm on an ASPX page. At the top of this page it says "How DO I (SQL Server)". Okay that's good. I appear to be at least in an area related to what I want to know. In this section "SQL Server Database Services (How Do I)", "SQL Server Analysis Services (How Do I)", etc. you get the idea. None of them really what I want to know, which is how to open an/the object explorer.

Oh hey! There at the top! It says "Ask a Question". Have I suddenly found the mythical search feature?! Nope... Takes me to MSDN Search where if I type in "open the object explorer" or even "object explorer" (WITH QUOTES) I get the first 1-10 of over FOUR THOUSAND results, almost none of them having anything to do with SQL Server. So I go back (which in itself is a challenge), and finally as I'm writing this article I see "Search" at the top. Which even once I've found it, still doesn't seem to produce any results that explain how to open the object explorer...

::SIGH::