Over the past couple of days we have achieved a milestone with HelpMaster Pro… For the first time (in a long time at least), we have the web module hosted on an external hosting provider.  Now, this was not the easiest thing to do – but it did foster a lot of knowledge of IIS and web hosting…

These steps might help anyone wishing to try and host a web based implementation of HelpMaster pro outside their organisation...

The first consideration is the database – where will the database live?  We wanted to host our demo database outside of our network.  To take full advantage of moving your web interface to an external location, you want all traffic outside of network – so you are best to look for a provider that offers SQL2005 – and preferably as much control as possible (if you can connect with SQL Management Studio, you are set).  I created a database locally using the database wizard and then detached it.  After a little bit of fiddling, I was able to upload and attach the database – first hurdle sorted!

Next, upload the application files.  I performed a HelpMaster installation with the web locally then uploaded all the contents of the ‘web_structure’ folder to the web host.  It needs to be placed somewhere where you can create an independent application.  For some time I was trying to create it under a virtual directory in ‘helpmasterpro.com’ but this didn’t work.  Why?  DotNetNuke interfered with it – HelpMaster was reporting a lot of interdependencies with DotNetNuke even though they don’t exist!  So, if you are already hosting one application, the best way may be to go with a subdomain which is treated as a whole new website.  This allows the application to be totally independent.

In creating the folder structure, you need to keep in mind that the language files need to be two levels below the web_structure directory.  This stumped me at first – I wasn’t sure how we would solve that.   But, I created a wizbang folder, then a hmpweb folder and finally put the web_structure folder in there, and the 'Languages' folder two levels up in ‘wizbang’… working!  For more information, see knowledge base article WEB-03.

A couple of additional tweaks were needed to get the most out of the interface – you need to create a directory for the attachments and the html images, and put the physical path on the web server into the database.  The html images path will also need to be set as a virtual directory (the name matching the one in the web.config file – the default is hmp_html).  Also, I gave both directories – the attachments and HTML images – read/execute/write/delete permissions.  Finally, as with any HelpMaster database – you will need to create full text catalogues on the knowledge base table (to allow proper searching) and on the helpdesk job table (to allow for full text searching).

One all these steps were done, it worked!  This was a bit of a whirlwind tour but if you have any questions at all or would like more information, please feel free to ask!

Steve