SAP OSS notes are corrections produced by SAP to know issues and security flaws. OSS was the original name for the online service provided by SAP to report issues with your standard SAP system. You would log into OSS and describe the issue you were having. SAP would then log into your system and ascertain if it was a problem with SAP standard code or with any custom code you have implemented. If it turned out to be an issue with SAP they would create a fix in the form of an OSS note.
The OSS note includes any instructions required to fix the issue, code corrections, new tables/fields, what release it was valid for and any pre-requisites.
This meant that any solution developed could be made available to other institutions running the relevant version of SAP. It's not just fixes but other instructions related to SAP installation, development and customization. SAP notes are available via the service marketplace which used to be access via URL http://service.sap.com. You can still use this address but will re-direct you to the new location.
SNOTE to download, read and automatically implement known correction instructions
It's not that long ago all SAP notes needed to implemented manually including any code changes, table/fields creations etc. But now the majority of notes can be implemented via transaction SNOTE. All ABAP code instructions can be implemented via SNOTE but things like new tables or fields will still need to be created manually. This is only a minority of notes though
See here for some example SAP OSS Notes:
- SAP Note 13283
SAP OSS Note 5312
SAP OSS Note 11911
SAP OSS Note 16534
SAP OSS Note 20643
SAP OSS Note 28869
SAP OSS Note 562252
SAP OSS Note 609541
SAP OSS Note 698549
SAP OSS Note 703609
SAP OSS Note 726762
SAP OSS Note 808382
SAP OSS Note 848399
SAP OSS Note 918541
SAP OSS Note 975279
SAP OSS Note 1000062
SAP OSS Note 1005380
SAP OSS Note 1272921
SAP OSS Note 2020373
SAP OSS Note 2021443
SAP OSS Note 2041913
SAP OSS Note 2057057
SAP OSS Note 2079680