Patch Notifications

Our position has been to have the users sign up for the email notifications but unless we are seeing an issue in PROD, we do not proactively look for PT's to install. We would catch those on the next MSP. We only address PT's for items that are broken/not functioning as needed through cases, ID errors, etc.

Lettting the users decide what they would like to test opens up a can of worms. Most of the time they don't know what the PT would cover from that small description anyway.

Just a thought but proactively seeking patches for things that we don't use/have or utilize in the manner the PT is fixing was just too big a task for us.

I agree with you 100% in most situations.
However, the team using lawson is only 12 people, and the reviewer would only be the head of the team. So far he agrees totally that we only want to put on patches that are absolutely required, and at that point, only when he has total agreement from his team.
He's already getting the email notification as well, but if a technical person like myself can't make sense of what lawson is *really* patching in a pt, I can't expect an end user to.
I really would expect someone at Lawson to retype the email into legible grammatically correct emails prior to sending them to their customer base. And what we get each week is anything but that. Run on sentences, no punctuation, etc. I can't make sense of where one fix ends and the next begins in these emails.
We just decided to try going through this new procedure of reviewing patches this morning. We expect that 99.99% of the time we'll wait for the SP releases, but part of this process is so that I can be a bit more proactive in my support of the product, or at the very least, when something *is* broken, we all can say "oh yeah, i remember reading that on one of the notifications".

SOunds like you have a good plan in place, we too struggle with the announcements and have no good way around it but to take the ones we see on the weekly list that apply and then research the PT manually.

I wish I had a better solution as well.

I just had to open a ticket with LIS because I saw a patch description that looked like it fit our situation. Once I put the CTP in I did not see the results I expected and at the end of the ticket I was told the description was complete misleading and basically wrong. I ended up not needing the CTP at all. Oh well.
I read through the weekly emails and if I see something I think applies to our business process I will discuss it with the rest of the IT team and apply in test and have business owners test. I do not try applying patches for items we are not currently using, just try to catch errors before users do.