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HP Logo Investment Announcement
HP Software Support
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As a valued HP software customer we are pleased to inform you that HP Software Support is making a multi-million dollar investment in Software Support, focused on improving our technical infrastructure, unifying our systems and processes and further enhancing the skills of our people. Our goal is to provide you with a world-class support experience and the highest level of customer service.

We continuously gather feedback from our customer base and use this information to guide further investments. Based on the feedback received we have identified the following key investment areas for 2008:

  1. Access to Support
    SAID (Service Agreement ID) contract issues to be resolved shortly.
  2. First contact experience
    Increased Support Center resources and improved telephony infrastructure plans.
  3. Time-to-resolution
    More training and increased collaboration between Support and R&D to accelerate time-to-resolution.
  4. Web experience
    We're investing in a better online experience for you now and in the future.
    » Web Enhancements April - June
    » Further Web Enhancements
    » SSO 2008 and beyond

We look forward to providing you with regular updates on the progress as these important efforts proceed throughout 2008. We will share our next update end of April.

We believe these investments will enable us to deliver a world-class support experience to all our customers, and we encourage you to continue to provide feedback on our progress. As always, our goal is to deliver a leading support experience and help you to unlock the value of your HP support investment.


1. Access to Support

Some customers recently experienced contract issues, and our top priority has been to resolve this situation. We are pleased to announce that 90% of SAID (Service Agreement ID) contract issues are now resolved, and we expect to achieve 100% resolution circa end of March. We now have processes in place to prevent a recurrence of recent issues. Additionally, the team is working through all 28,800 former Mercury MPNs to ensure ease of migration and creation of an active SAID.

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2. First contact experience

We are increasing our resources in the regional Incident Management Support Centers (IMSCs) and improving our telephony infrastructure capabilities. Our aim is to enhance the initial contact customer experience by improving responsiveness, call handling and the direction of customer service requests to the appropriate groups within our organization. The initial phases of our plan are scheduled for the June/July timeframe.

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3. Time to Resolution

In order to accelerate time-to-resolution, we are focusing on two key areas: training and increased collaboration between Support and the HP Software R&D organization.
During the next 6 to 8 months we will increase our support staffing by 15% and every support engineer will have 15 days of mandatory technical training. We are also increasing the number of personnel assigned to the Problem Management Support Centers where our support personnel directly collaborate with R&D engineers. One of the goals is to expand our engineers' knowledge across a broader spectrum of products, resulting in improved delivery of patches and collaboration between R&D and Support.

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4. Web experience

Our Web vision comprises of both short-term and long-term improvements to SSO (Software Support On line). We will create an integrated web solution to support our ITIL and KCS Support Delivery framework and offer Web 2.0 capabilities. We have recently instigated two key enhancements: Flash-based training and the re-introduction of Mercury Discussion Forums.
The flash-based training is an excellent introduction on navigating through SSO and highlighting key features. The modular design allows you to review specific sections of interest or the entire training set.

We also recently added Mercury-focused discussion forums to SSO. They are available under the Troubleshooting Tab on http://www.hp.com/go/hpsoftwaresupport.

Legacy Mercury Discussion Forum documents have been archived in our HP SSO Self Solve knowledge base.  To locate them, select the Advance Self Solve page, and select Discussion Forums as your searchable document type. For best retrieval results, search using a unique phrase or words likely to be contained in the title or body text of the article. Please refer to the 'Best Practice' guidelines, pages 30-33 of the customer training presentation. Please note that the Legacy Discussion Forum documents are not located in our 'live' forums.   

Discussion Forums are hosted on HP's IT Resource Center (ITRC).When you access our Discussion Forums, you are redirected to the HP ITRC website. Be sure to bookmark HP SSO http://www.hp.com/go/hpsoftwaresupport so that you can easily return to the correct support site for your primary software support needs. 

Useful Tip: If you find yourself on the main page of ITRC and need to get back to HP SSO, you will find a link to HP Software Support Online in the right navigation bar under Useful Links; this will navigate you back to the SSO portal site. 

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Web Enhancements April - June

We have a number of key features scheduled for deployment in the April - June timeframe:

  • Simple and advanced search features
  • Attachment improvement
  • File transfer capability
  • Automatic customer incident status Notification
  • Search for specific incident Number Capability
  • Search ability for all SAID Incidents
  • Automated e-Mail Content improvements.

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Further Web Enhancements

Visibility of closed Mercury & Peregrine cases
We are continuing to map 500,000 legacy Mercury and legacy Peregrine closed case records to new Support Agreement IDs. We will update the target availability for these closed case records as soon as we finalize technical integration. We understand this functionality is important to you and are working to provide it quickly.

HP Case Manager Migration - Europe
HP is completing a version upgrade to the case management system used for tracking customer support cases for hardware and software products in Europe. This will provide you with a consolidated view of all hardware and software cases. This migration impacts ONLY those support cases that were opened prior to Feb 15, 2008 that are not yet resolved. Your support engineer will transfer all case information to the new case ID and will contact you with the new case ID.

Patch strategy
Several key areas of improvement have been identified with respect to patches on the Software Solutions Online (SSO) portal. We will address search capabilities, the display mechanism and a means to make it easier to identify which patch is applicable for your environment. To inform us about any patch related issues you experience, please click the "PATCH FEEDBACK" link in the right-hand menu on the SSO Patch page on the SSO portal.

When searching for knowledge, documentation or patches you might not see a bundle product in the product list, if there is no content related to the bundle itself. Please search for the individual product content. If the product is not visible in "your" product list, uncheck the "show only my products" checkbox to get the complete list of products.

We also have a number of key features rolling out in the early April to June timeframe. The stability of the Software Support Online portal is equally a high priority; in February planned availability was 98.9%. Work continues to improve uptime, including the installation of patches last week to improve network latency issues and the deployment of Business Availability Center to monitor SSO Portal availability and performance.

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SSO 2008 and beyond

We are assessing the capabilities that will provide you with the best overall support experience and are creating a model which will empower you to manage your own web support experience. As part of that process, we are evaluating the following feature improvements and Web 2.0 concepts:

  • Additional collaboration capabilities
    • Share and access Best Practices, Tips and Tricks, Lab Tips
    • Share your experience by augmenting and annotating online knowledge
    • Tag online knowledge for improved search capability
  • Instant access to the right resource
    • Connect directly to an engineer at the push of a button
    • Chat with engineers and online peers
    • Seamless transition from self-solve to community-solve to assisted solve
  • Enhanced learning activities
    • webcasts and podcasts
    • highly interactive training material
    • hosted chat rooms with experts
  • Personalization
    • Subscription to relevant RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds
    • Customized alerts and update
    • Improved portal design for ease of use and navigation

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Resources:

» SSO Portal
For web resources and documents

» SSO Customer Training
Web-based

» Support Customer Handbook

» How to log a support incident

» FAQs
Answers to those frequently asked questions

Technology for better business outcomes