Adding a custom help link in EPiServer 7

This one will be firmly filed under the "obscure client requests and undocumented features" section.

Some site owners may have internal support systems or policy guides that they want to give the editor easy access to. 

One way to do that is to add custom links in the global help menu in EPiServer (the Question Mark icon in the upper-right corner).

By default, this help menu will contain links to CMS, Online Center, License Agreement and About EPiServer, which open in a popup window.

To add your own link, open web.config and add the following section:

<episerver.shell>
    <navigation>
      <add text="My custom link" menuItemType="Link" target="_blank" 
menuPath="/global/help/internalhelp" url="http://someurl.com"
sortIndex="1100" />
    </navigation>
</episerver.shell>

What the attributes mean:

• text: Menu item text
• url: Which URL or relative filepath the menuitem will execute 
• sortIndex: Sets order of items. In the help menu, 1100 or higher is bottom of list.
• menuPath: defines where the menu item will be shown. These are hardcoded, like "/global/help/internalhelp" and "/global/dashboard"). 
• menuItemType: Type of menuitem, can be "Link", "Section" or "DropDown". Useful when adding a new Global Menu item (see below).
• target: How the url will be opened, can be "_self" (same tab/window, default if not specified) or "_blank" (new tab/window).

Above: Original help menu, help menu with custom link item.

Adding a custom global menu link

You could actually use this same approach to add custom global menuitems (next to the Dashboard and CMS tabs) by using menuPath="/global/somecustomname":

<episerver.shell>
    <navigation>
      <add text="My custom menuitem" menuItemType="Link" target="_blank" 
menuPath="/global/somecustomname" url="/Plugins/MyCustomPlugin.ascx" 
sortIndex="1100" />
    </navigation>
</episerver.shell>

Which will render like this:

See more documentation about configuring the episerver.shell section. 

Disclaimer: It is really not recommended to add global menu items directly in web.config this way. You should add them in code instead.