How would people feel about an area in this forum for product announcements?
I don’t mean something to replace the “Early Product Announcements” in ServLine24, but someplace to let people know when new patch levels are available. Often I only find out about a new patch level when there is a problem and I check the knowledge base or open a support request.
That’s right! We usually find out about a new patch level that way. But to be honest: In most cases, the problem isn’t solved to our satisfaction.
Sometimes patches are said to have “healing power”. 
By “Early Product Announcements” are you referring to the subscription option “Autonotify” on ServLine24? I made an inquiry to SL24 about patch level email notification and received this feedback.
The “Autonotify” subscription option currently includes major (critical) patch levels (the determination of whether to include a PL in autonotify is controlled by support). “Minor” PLs were excluded because the frequently of messages made the autonotification messages less than useful to most users. So “minor” PL’s are not included. Also, as you might have noticed, the autonotify subscription is limited to platform(s) only (Mainframe, UNIX, Workstation, Open Systems, All Platforms) not specific products.
A possible future enhancement has been suggested to permit the ability to subscribe to autonotify by both platform and product, including the option to choose notification for all patch levels or just major ones. I think this would be a useful enhancement.
Chris Walsh
SAGGroup, North American Area Rep
We do make product announcements available on the Community under the “Releases” section of the home page; however these are announcements of major releases only and not patch levels. We are discussing how to make patch level information available, watch this space
There is a separate section for the Early Product Announcements under Products, it has proposed release dates for products/patch levels.
I made the same inquiry about the Autonotify and got the same response, but I have also found that the autonotify is not that great anyway. I seem to not get notifications for many major product announcements, and this is after un-subscribing and re-subscribing, getting some of the ServLine24 admins to reset my profile, etc. I was also told that the autonotify is somewhat of a manual process for the announcement to be sent, so that could also be why.
The ability to select both platform and product would be very nice, along with being able to choose all or just major releases!