I seem to be spending a lot of time in My Oracle Support (MOS) recently, and I’m going to say this is due to the vast quantity of helpful information contained therein, not because everything I touch has broken for past three months.  It has been an opportunity to explore some MOS functionality.  One nice feature I hadn’t seen before is the configurable ‘Hot Topics’ email, which provides a great way to keep up to date with new support information.

The material available includes updates to:

• SRs – though unless you’re an administrator at a large corporate, you hopefully don’t have so many of those on the go that you’d need a daily email
• Knowledge Articles
• Alerts
• Bugs
• Product News
• Desupport Notice
• Field Action Bulletins (which sound like something Douglas Haig would read, but apparently relates to hardware)

Setup is fairly self-explanatory; once logged in to MOS, select the ‘Settings’ tab and then ‘Hot Topics E-Mail’ from the selections under ‘Personal’ in the menu to the left:

Hot Topics setup

You can choose which types of content you want to receive, how many items in each category, and limit the content to specific product and platform combinations.  I set mine up earlier this week to include Essbase, Smart View and Planning (just for starters).  And that’s it: Once activated, you will receive one ‘Hot Topics’ email every day.

Here’s a partial snapshot of yesterday’s email – the updates to knowledge articles are (in my opinion) the really interesting pieces, although the bugs section has also thrown up some interesting snippets:

Sample Hot Topic content

Combined with a mailbox rule to redirect to a particular folder (so they don’t clutter up my inbox if I don’t get to them for a while, or – ha ha – take a vacation without checking email) I think this is a useful and easily digestible way to catch a lot new information that might otherwise be missed.  And all without having to log in to MOS, which I may not do quite so frequently when I don’t have active SRs.