I'm passing on this message from Danny Lau who is with the support
organization.

     One of the demos at the HP booth at HPWorld is Electronic Support
     Center (ESC).  There will also be a round table discussion on ESC.
     You will get a chance to talk directly to an engineer/manager (rather
     than a General manager that might not know the details) regarding any
     enhancement you would like to see.

     Regards,
     Danny Lau

Stan said:

Hi all,

HP WORLD 99 is coming up fast ... I'd like to encourage people to
ask HP *WHEN* they'll have a decent search engine for HP ESC.

The current one sucks, even though it's slightly better than the
previous one.

This has been a topic at the HP Management Round Table for years...
and nothing has happened.  We get the obligatory "we'll look into it",
and sometimes "we're working on something new" ... but we never get
a good answer, and we've never gotten the best answer.

The best answer:

    All documents in HP ESC's Knowledge Data Base (KDB) should
    be accessible via a publically-accessible web server, so that
    external search engines could access/index them.

    Against the expected claim of "we're exposing problems to our
    competitors" we more than balance:  (a) we're helping our
    users (the HP Way, remember?), and (b) it's a competitive
    *advantage* to be able to say "HP has nothing to hide" ...
    indeed, it's a tool to be used to sell HP computers!
    (Of course, I often forget: HP isn't really trying to sell
    computers any more, are they?)

The good answer:

     We'll buy/borrow a real search engine, one which lets you:

        - say "this word *MUST* be in the hit".  e.g.:  +showme
        - say "this word *MAY NOT* be in the hits"  e.g.:  -spooler
        - specify OR/AND/NOT and parenthesis
        - do simple pattern matching.  e.g., : spool*

This isn't rocket science ... it's simple to do, and indeed *must*
be done.

Oh yes, where *has* Interex been these last few years?  Providing a
platform where we can beg for needed features is nice ... but where's
the muscle?  Where's the insistency, not just advocacy?

I'd ask my friends on the Interex board to help ... but ...

Hmmm, maybe they could appoint someone from Altavista.com to be
on the board?  :)

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                         http://www.allegro.com/sieler/