Support paywall can seem to hide manuals
October 14, 2013
We're investigating another point of confusion between HP's MPE/iX and 3000 manuals and the 3000 community. Donna Hofmeister, one of the former OpenMPE directors who heard HP's promise to keep these manuals available to the general public, emailed us this report.
It appears that HP has cut off public access to the MPE manuals. If you use HP's link through its Business Support Center, and go thru a couple of clicks... you'll eventually be asked for support credentials.
In my opinion, this shouldn't be the case for MPE manuals (since, after all, who has HP's MPE support anyhow?). HP agreed to continue to allow access to the MPE things (including patches) when they vendor was negotiating with OpenMPE.
Hofmeister noted that the patches are still available for free. The good news is that the 3000 community has been compiling the manuals outside HP's servers, just to ensure the vendor kept its promise of open access to 3000 documentation. And there is a more concealed path into the manuals today. Just not through the front door Hofmeister was using.
Straight to the point, things are changing in the HP support operations and its access for users. A support contract might be required, in HP's confusion over the 3000's place on the website, if you head in through the wrong address. Or read a recent HP email.
So there's no way to pay for support that would deliver access to MPE materials. Which is why HP told OpenMPE and the 3000 community the access would be free.
Independent support companies, third parties and adept managers have been squirreling away the manuals for years by now. In addition to a core set of manuals at yet another HP website address, linked to by Applied Technologies via a direct link off mpe-opensource.org, MM Support has a wide array of these manuals for download. MM Support, a group of 3000 veterans who created the MM/3000 ERP software, says it's hosting these documents, organized by function as well as alphabetically, because of "the great love we have for the HP 3000."
The following list is a beginning. We have laid the HP 3000 MPE Manuals out in a manner that is friendly to use. We will try and have both HTML and PDF format for the HP3000 Manuals.
As we've noted, MPE patches seem to be available without support credentials. Hofmeister says you need a lot of patience. You're likely to get asked about the HP 3000 latex printer a few times.
I'm still sending people to HP to get patches. Last one was maybe a month ago. The process seems to work, although I always caution them to be prepared to be patient. Getting through the front-line call handlers can be difficult :-(
I suspect many people downloaded all the patches while the FTP site was still available. But in my opinion, they'd be well advised to at least be very careful about who they give these patches to, since HP seems to be in a litigious mood.