Patent ruling forces Microsoft to get their customers upgrade Office installations

Patent ruling forces Microsoft to get their customers upgrade Office installations

Software giant Microsoft has to advice some of their customers to upgrade their copies of MS Office suite and MS Access application to comply with a 2005 patent infringement ruling. The ruling forces the company to remove the patented feature from their products and as a result, users would have to update their copies with the updated versions.

The company is now informing the users to upgrade their copies of new corporate installations of Office Professional 2003 and Access 2003 to install Service Pack 2. The company was asked by the courts last year to pay Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado $8.9 million for infringing his 1994 patent.

This patent is related to techniques helpful in transferring data between Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and the Access database using a single spreadsheet. The good news was that the other nine patent related issues were not accepted by the courts, which has saved the company some major headaches.

Sunny Jensen Charlebois, senior product manager for worldwide licensing and pricing at Microsoft said in a statement on this: “We understand that this will create an inconvenience for a small percentage of our customers and are committed to working with them through the process and easing the inconvenience as best as possible.”

Download: Patch for Office 2003 | Patch for Office XP Professional