Looking for a good tool for online help

Question

I'm looking for a tool that would allow a small team to build out on-line help content for our web application. Ideally, the tool would allow us to grow the help content very easily, so something like a wiki or a CMS would work well.

I have no real experience with any of these types of tools, so I need some opinions. These are my ideal requirements:

• Support video help content.
• Support for tags and a good search engine.
• Ability to integrate all of the above with our web application in a context-sensitive way. There should be a way to query the help site for help content relevant to the current module in the application so the application can show a list of relevant topics.
• Ideally, I'm looking for free software.. or at the very least a one time inexpensive payment. I'd rather host the software on our software than pay a monthly fee for our content to be hosted somewhere else.

Any recommendations of products you've actually used?

Answer 1

Have you looked at http://stackexchange.com/ ?

Answer 2

PBworks.com has a great wiki/collaboration product starting at FREE!! You can begin using their free product then upgrade to suit your needs.

Answer 3

We decided to roll our own on this. Thanks for the suggestions.

Answer 4

Take a look at MindTouch. It supports video and PDF creation as well as standard CMS activities. The backend is C# and is very well written as it provides an embedded scripting capability for quick customization. It has DB connectors for Oracle, SQL and MySQL. It's pretty impressive.