How do I remove the help icon and link from the SharePoint header?

Question

According to Microsoft, the SharePoint help pages present a security concern and should be disabled. Since we don't want users clicking on a broken help icon, it needs to be removed as well. What's the best way of removing the icon and the separator pipe that's to the left of it?

Answer 1

If you want to increase security, then hiding a link is not the best option for that. Disallowing access to the content page would be a better choice. If you run a small SharePoint farm, you can

• open up IIS management console
• find the web application responsible for the public portal
• find the _layouts virtual folder
• find the file help.aspx and open the Properties window for that file
• change the access permissions for that file.
• repeat these steps for "HelpSearch.aspx", too

You'll have to repeat these steps on all servers in your web farm.

Answer 2

Although naivists approach is secure, the end user will get an error message this way.

You can remove the link by inserting a small bit of JavaScript into every page. Doing this by hand is tedious, which is why you can use something like the free SharePoint Infuser to automatically output this JavaScript to each page. Note that it doesn't actually modify the page, it just adds script to it.

Plenty of examples are available.

Answer 3

After doing some research, seems that commenting out the following lines in the master pages does the trick for the icon. The separator still seems to be there though.

<td valign="middle" class="ms-globallinks">&nbsp;
    <a href="javascript:TopHelpButtonClick('NavBarHelpHome')" AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_helplink_accesskey%>" id="TopHelpLink" title="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_helplinkalt_text%>" runat="server"><img align='absmiddle' border=0 src="/_layouts/images/helpicon.gif" alt="<%$Resources:wss,multipages_helplinkalt_text%>" runat="server"></a>
</td>