Having large SAS 9.4 platforms, a periodic hotfix routine solves a lot of problems in advance.
As SAS partner, we support banks and insurance with > 30 SAS servers each.
You don't want to do a manual hotfix management with that many servers, so we implemented a mechanism to check for and report new available hotfixes in a compressed format.
Therefore, we wrote some sort of HTML-parser (for the HTML files generated by SASHFADD for each server) using regex to gather informations like "is hotfix xyz an Alert hotfix, has it manual steps in it, which SAS product is being hotfixed" and so on.
Since this HTML-parsing is quite complex and error-prone, a machine readable file like XML or JSON would be much easier to process.
I guess, this is easy to implement, because you already have all the information to do that.
Additionally, hotfix dependencies can be listed more easily.
Thanks and best regards!
Chris
