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Finding HP's MPE Patches and Papers

FrescheFaceSpeedware has become Fresche Legacy this year, but the vendor's still got its storehouse of HP 3000 documents, white papers and even HP patches available online. You just have to poke directly at the pages you want to hit.

When it became Fresche in the spring, the company put a new face on its website. For awhile it was tough to hop into any HP 3000 page from those Speedware days. But a direct link opens the path to documents which are not found many other places on the Web. HP-authored MPE whitepapers, for example.

The company announced this summer that it's just booked five outsourcing agreements with North American companies worth more than $10 million. These are application outsource contracts -- the sort of business resource which Fresche Legacy continues to offer in the 3000 marketplace.

However, there's still a good deal of resource online from the many years when Speedware was an HP Platinum migration partner, as well as a supplier of migration software such as AMXW. That software's still available today. The HP 3000 paper and patch site has a front door of www.speedware.com/HPe3000_resources

There's some surprising advice online that seems to retain its value for the 3000 homesteader, too. This kind of customer might be the one holding off on migrations until the budgeting is better. It's been a tough year for the economy in North America, and even tougher in Europe. One way to stretch the 3000's capabilities might be through open source software. That speedware.com address has a Powerpoint presentation on creating ports for open source products to MPE/iX. (Even more information on using existing open source tools on the 3000, right down to Unix fundamentals like tar, is at the mpe-opensource.org website run by Applied Technologies.)

Such HP-written papers used to be hosted on HP's Jazz server, pulled offline in 2008 when the MPE labs closed down. HP once hosted patches online, too -- including some that made it into beta test, but not general release. You can grab these on the speedware.com pages, too. 

There's a lengthy EULA agreement that pops up automatically when you drive into the website, something HP's lawyers insisted upon before licensing this content to third party partners such as Client Systems. We clocked it at about 40 pages when we hit the "Agree" button more than three years ago. HP's Jazz never had such a requirement while its contents were hosted inside Hewlett-Packard.

In a way, HP's outsourced these paper and patches by putting them in the hands of Fresche and Client Systems. Outsourcing can be a good arrangement when an entity, either vendor or client, wants to move on to other opportunities -- like Fresche president Andy Kulakowski said about his new North American outsourcing deals. 

These new outsourcing contracts further strengthen our legacy management position and further support our vision to make our customers’ businesses run better by making their IT run better. Organizations that outsource, or are considering outsourcing application management functions, are a perfect fit for our complete service offering.

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