Tech Tip: Get updates about new/important MOS Notes

There’s nothing more annoying than unwanted and useless email newsletters in your inbox.

No doubt.

But sometimes I wish to have an alert about important MOS Note changes, recent additions to my favorite notes, updates to the bugs I monitor etc. I would like to know about helpful new MOS articles – when they get published 😉

And this is what you need to do (and I’ll have to apologize for the small pictures but our fancy, modern blog design template does not allow to include larger pictures …).

Log into MOS and change your SETTINGS

Once you’ve logged in you’ll click on MORE and then navigate to SETTINGS.

Choose HOT TOPICS EMAIL in the left navigation menu

Update the settings

Here it is important that you choose “Send with Selected Options” first and then “HTML” as otherwise the email does not seem to get sent (“Text” option does not seem to work).

Add Products you’d like to get updates about 

Of course you may add more products – I chose only the “Database” in my example.

Change the number of items you’d like to see 

*** AND DON’T FORGET TO HIT THE “APPLY” BUTTON FURTHER DOWN ON THE SCREEN ***

 Check your current Favorites

Then it’s important to check your current “Favorites”. Click on the yellow/orange STAR in the upper menu close to the search field and select “Documents”. If “Documents” does not get displayed there’s no need to clean up as you haven’t marked anything as favorite yet. But in my below example you see that I have a lot of very old docs in my list.

So I will clean them up first.

Clean Up the favorite documents list

Click on “Manage Favorites” via the yellow/orange STAR and mark all unwanted documents by using either the usual SHIFT or STRG keys. Hit “Remove”.

In my case the list is empty now.

Mark documents as FAVORITES 

The important work is now to mark certain documents or bugs as FAVORITES. In the below example I’d choose the most important MOS Note 161818.1 via the plain ID search (right side of the screenshot), and once the note gets displayed I’ll push the withe STAR on the upper left corner above the document – the STAR will turn yellow/orange.

Once I’ve did that I will find this note now in my list of favorite documents:

Repeat this with the notes you’d like to get informed about changes. For instance I monitor always the “Known Issues and Alerts” for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 and 11.2.0.4:

Receive the email update

Once you’ve did that you’ll get an email per day with the recent changes – and it will contain information about the updates in your fav notes.

Summary

It’s hard to keep track about recent changes and updates to important MOS Notes. And it’s even harder to learn about newly published articles in your areas of interest. The HOT Topics email feature in MOS is pretty cool and extremely helpful. I like it a lot.

But you’ll have to enable it first in your settings as MOS does not want to spam you.

Credits to Roy who dug out all the tiny pieces such as the HTML switch 😉

–Mike