Since I provided technical support for HP SupportLine in my previous life,
I felt qualified to comment:
 
HP SupportLine has installations in the U.S. (Mt. View, CA), Europe (Bristol,
England) and Asia-Pacific (Singapore).  The base HPSL resides on an HP3000
but the software for the WWW and Email interfaces are housed on an HP9000,
accessing data on both an HP3000 and an HP9000.  Unfortunately, because of
the way the original system was designed, you don't currently have the ability
to to switchover to an alternate installation when using the HP3000 interface
because the customer registration data (system handle and password) is not
currently replicated a cross installations.  Therefore, each regional
installation can currently only recognize the registered customers within
its own region.  Registered customers are those who have a software support
contract with HP.
 
The HPSL team is working to change this so that registration data is shared
across systems and customers have the ability to switch to an alternate machine if one of the installations is having a problem (actually the goal is that
this will be transparent to the user and an auto-switchover will occur).
 
As a note, the WWW and EMail interfaces do not require registration for
basic searches against HPSL, which the HP3000 version does.  The WWW and EMail
interfaces do not have the full feature set of the HP3000 based HPSL until we
can authenticate users (also in progress) but you can still do everything
except electronic call submittal and service notes on the WWW and Email
interfaces.  HOWEVER, the WWW and Email services are currently only installed
on the support.mayfield.hp.com machine in Mt. View so you're still back where
you started from.  The HPSL team is also working on getting these services
replicated in Europe so if support.mayfield is having troubles you can access
HPSL in Europe.
 
For the record, to access HPSL on WWW go to URL: http://support.mayfield.hp.com
 
Via email, send a message (no subject required) to this address:
 
[log in to unmask]
 
In the text of your message type:
 
send guide
 
You'll get a user guide back via email that tells you how to use the email
interface to HPSL.
 
Since I haven't been intimately involved with HPSL for a month now, I don't
know what kinds of production problems they've been having lately, but I
forwarded your comments to the HPSL team for review.
 
 
Good Luck,
Tracy DeDore    [log in to unmask]