Microsoft brings Office under 'Genuine Advantage' authentication program

Microsoft brings Office under 'Genuine Advantage' authentication program

Microsoft has announced that it will be offering Windows Genuine Advantage authentication to Office copies in what is being seen as an effort to battle rampant piracy in this sphere. Windows Genuine Advantage, which sought to check up if the users' Windows OS is a legal one or not has worked very well and Redmond now wants to extend the facility to Office.

"While Microsoft Office is committed to participating in the advantages of Microsoft's overarching Genuine Software Initiative (GSI), there's nothing further to announce at this time," a company spokeswoman said. According to the software behemoth, the Office Genuine Advantage will initially be launched in seven languages, namely, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Spanish. The company already has a verification tool called as the Office Validation Assistant, or OVA, which uses ActiveX to validate that the user is in possession of a legal Office suite.

OGA will eventually replace OVA, the company acknowledged. After users install a notification tool, Redmond will send out the OGA invitation to millions of users. The pilot project is being initially conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. If the copy is a not genuine, user will see the following alert on start-up and login, "This copy of Windows is not genuine; you may be a victim of software counterfeiting." Those who have a genuine copy will not get any alerts.

David Lazar, director of the Windows Genuine program at Microsoft said that users can also decline to install the tool and stop the alerts by right-clicking on them when they pop-up. This new anti-piracy fight by Microsoft is a prelude to the launch of its new operating system, the Windows Vista in 2007. Certain feature in the Vista will only work as long as it is a licensed copy.