Shutdown of Obitalk Website and Device Configuration

[Lavarock7]

First let me say that I am HP Retired having worked 17 years in I.T. there and other companys. I have a bit of knowledge of devices, adapters, websites and certainly customer support.

I have a good guess as to how and why HP acquired the product line and why they may want to shut down the website. I am not talking nefarious reasons, just business decision. Still, with as many people who have purchased devices and invested time in effort in the Forums, I had hoped the company would have done two things before shutting down operations as they will be doing.

1) I believe that HP should allow volunteers to acquire the existing User Forum from the Obitalk site. This is not an official support site and has never purported to be. You should know that the volunteers are probably at least or more expert on the product line and versions than HP support staff are. The existing site could be made availavle to some of the prolific posters and experts in the violunteer community and allow them to host it elsewhere so that HP is not bearing the costs (which is probably why HP is shutting it down now).

2) I believe there are programs available for 'business' users to remotely configure and manage devices from a central location. I personally manage many remote devices for neighbors and friends across the U.S. and Canada. THe Obitalk website allowed us to perform that function and the website then pushed the configs out to the devices. Now we lose that ability. If there is a program which would allow us to export a device configuration and make changes to it (as the website did) and then upload it remotely, I would hope that HP could make that available to us. Since they are no longer going to support existing devices and will not be creating new residential devices I am guessing, they would not have to support the software anymore but perhaps it could become open source.

One untested solution to remote support would be that I would have a random port of the remote router forwarded to the IP address and port 80 of the device where I could at least access the device web interface. I would rather want to have a way to at least store, modify and upload a config. So if there is a program already, can we have it?

I am hoping that HP will take my suggestiions to heart and at least consider them.

[M_Salman]

Hi @Lavarock7, Welcome to Poly HP Support Community.  
 

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We truly appreciate your input and will ensure it reaches the appropriate team for consideration. Your insights are important to us as we strive to improve our services.

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Regards,

Salman