HP Support Center chokes up info delivery
August 15, 2011
The Grand Opening at the HP Support Center this summer is closing down access to entitled requests, according to users and support providers. Donna Hoffmeister of Allegro Consulting has been stymied on multiple occasions since HP's ITRC website got its makeover during June.
She reports that her particular rants on the Center include
1. My repeatedly getting locked out from entitled (knowledge base) documents. I'll go for weeks with no trouble, then “poof” I suddenly can't get in.
2. Access support for the Support Center is very hard to locate (it's buried under several non-obvious links). Plus, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually get a human to talk to, if you finally figure out how to ask a question. When you do, you get a boiler-plate reply (from some offshore person).
There's more -- but we'd like to know what your experience has been with the new website for HP support. Rants or just reports, we'd like to hear them all. We'll anonymize your identification, if you'd prefer.
Nearly all external (Google) searches for (even HP-UX) content are broken, because they point to old, non-functioning ITRC links. While HP claims all the old content was ported to the new support center, none of it has been "trolled" by the big search engines -- so you’re left to use the support center's less-than-robust search function (ugh).
Hoffmeister adds that the demise of the ITRC is the second major change to Web-based content from HP; docs.hp.com was the first. "The net result is that HP information is no longer easily accessible," she said.