Sydney Tech Guy

Microsoft has been ordered to pay $290m to i4i, following a long-running patent spat with the firm over an XML – or extensible mark-up language – custom editor present in some editions of MS Word.

Microsoft only has until 11 January to remove the custom XML functionality – just five months on from the original August 2009 ruling.

Microsoft released the following patch in October:

2007 Microsoft Office Supplement Release (October 2009)

Microsoft has released a supplement for Office 2007 (October 2009). The following patch is required for the United States. The patch will work with all Office 2007 languages.

2007 Microsoft Office Supplemental Release (October 2009) .img 12.9 MB

After this patch is installed, Word will no longer read the Custom XML elements contained within DOCX, DOCM, or XML files. These files will continue to open, but any Custom XML elements will be removed. The ability to handle custom XML mark-up is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word.

The important thing to remember is that this patch is only required for the US and the ruling only affects Office users in the US. The ruling will not affect Australian users of Office even though Microsoft says that most users wouldn’t use the functionality that is impacted by this verdict, so breathe easy your Word is not getting taken away from you.