What's a good .NET / Windows tool for creating a Web troubleshooting tool?

Question

Does anyone know of a great way to create a step-by-step online troubleshooting tool?

My company will need to develop several such tools, customized for several clients.

Ultimately, we'd like an easy way to maintain a series of questions, with answer-dependent navigation.

We'll need to be able to support all of the standard types of questions you might imagine (true/false; multiple choice (choose one), multiple choose (choose more than one); etc.).

We would like a way for our business users to be able to maintain the questions, and, if possible, the flows, so a GUI that could control a database-driven back end would be great.

We've considered using WF for this task, but it doesn't provide an easy way for non-technical users to modify the workflow, and we're not even sure it can meet all of our needs (e.g. how do we store questions and possible paths).

We're in the very early stages of investigating this, but it seems like a common problem, which makes us think there are tools to solve it.

Does anyone have any experience solving such a problem or using any tools like the one we're looking for?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Sometimes a simple solution might be all thats needed for things that seem complicated. I would look into various Wiki solutions to be honest. They are quick, easy to edit, familiar, evolving and can also serve as a CMS.

I would avoid pinning yourself down with formal structure for something like this. You end up with something rigid and a high dependency on IT staff, something it sounds like you want to avoid.

I'm sure whatever you are troubleshooting will change with time (new product versions, related products etc) and a wiki will be flexible enough to handle that.

Answer 2

I created a workflow project that was database driven (not WWF). It use the concepts of templates, steps, questions, answers, logics, and owners. This allowed you to create surveys of sorts that had workflow behind them so that based on a selected answer the user might be taken to another step. Or if the owner of a step completed their step the next step in the template would be emailed to the next steps owner (or group of owners).

You could reverse this concept from questions to statements so that as a user navigates through their issue they are leading themselves to their answer in a similar fashion.

Template (help item) Step (steps within a help item, plugged in, turns on, shows login screen) Statements (a statement might be the various tasks to perform in a step) Answers (items within a statment for the user to select pertaining to if the item helped) Logic (what happens when an answer is selected, branching, new owner, etc.) Owner (who owns which step, can fit in groups) Group (group of owners of a step to satisfy completion)

Not sure if this is what you were thinking about or not.

Answer 3

This reminds me of an organizational concept called a "knowledge tree" where you can easily setup "destination leaves" which contain valuable documentation and you can provide a simple yes/no or multiple choice traversal based on a given situation.

There is a company called Knowledge Tree that offers a free version of their software (since there is no formal testing or tech support) that may give you a springboard in which to work with.