27 October 2006
Office Genuine Advantage added to Office 2007
For Microsoft Office users, it is required as of today to validate the authenticity of your Office 2007 before downloading online templets with OGA (Office Genuine Advantage). From January it will be required to authenticate Office before using Office Update.
OGA is created from WGA and hopefully doesn't have similar problems with misidentification of legitimate software. It seems the direction Microsoft is going is to have such features on all versions of their software, from Office to their games.
Not knowing exactly the scope of what this feature will eventually do, I cannot say whether this is a good or bad thing. With the Vista version limiting the number of times you can install the system or authenticate the system on a computer after hardware modifications, if OGA is similar it may not be so good. People's hard drives have problems and they have to reinstall everything, some have such problems that they are reinstalling even more often. The last thing that is needed is to have a problem on your computer and have to buy a new license for Office because you cannot authenticate it again after reinstalling it for example the third time.
OGA is created from WGA and hopefully doesn't have similar problems with misidentification of legitimate software. It seems the direction Microsoft is going is to have such features on all versions of their software, from Office to their games.
Not knowing exactly the scope of what this feature will eventually do, I cannot say whether this is a good or bad thing. With the Vista version limiting the number of times you can install the system or authenticate the system on a computer after hardware modifications, if OGA is similar it may not be so good. People's hard drives have problems and they have to reinstall everything, some have such problems that they are reinstalling even more often. The last thing that is needed is to have a problem on your computer and have to buy a new license for Office because you cannot authenticate it again after reinstalling it for example the third time.
Labels: microsoft, office, oga, wga
