Try to get back an automatic email notification about new or changed SAP Notes. Since SAP has closed down some of their internal servers, which hosted an unofficial database/API to the SAP Notes, the nice email notification service of the SAP LinuxLab is terminated. Now the only way is to log in to the sap launchpad and look at the generated list of new or updated SAP Notes. Additionally you can add some SAP Notes of special interest to your 'Favorites' and may be get a notification, if one of the 'Favorites' has changed (doesn't work for me right now, need to observe). This active polling of information is annoying and often a forgotten daily task.

So find a way to get back an automatic email notification.

in Hackweek 16: Because of the server side used java script stuff to create the interesting data of the displayed web page, wget and curl does not work for me. But using Selenium Webdriver in a python script (my first one) does the trick.

Now I request the information from the SAP launchpad automatically by a cron script. A very simple data processing in a shell script grabs the interesting data from the downloaded web pages and sent an e-mail notification.

Nice and with room for improvements :-)

in Hackweek 17: Over the time it turned out, that not all of the data of the 'new' and 'updated' pages from the sap launchpad are grabbed by my Selenium script. So I need to find out, how to improve to get the whole data I'm interested in.

I found a working solution to scroll to the end of the javascript stuff, which dynamical creates the table with SAP Notes. So now I got my list of all 'new' and 'updated' Notes. Additionally I found a way to store only the interesting part (the SAP Note table) of the web page and not the whole page source.

in Hackweek 19: As there are some colleagues from our SAP Alliance team are interested in this e-mail notification about SAP Notes I need to find a way of regular and reliable data provisioning. At the moment the cron job to query the SAP launchpad to get the newest data is running on my workstation, which means - if I'm in vacation or on business trip the system is not running, no data is collected and no e-mail notification is done. So I will try to find a better system to run my tool.