It’s been a long and busy weekend, and I’ve been thrown into work again as soon as I arrived at the office. I had to turn in my commitments today and line up the things I wanted to accomplish. I think I did pretty well for my first six months here at Microsoft. One of the commitments of FY07 was that I’d complete the entire New Hire Readiness Program, and I still have 13 hours of classes to go. So, I decided to do one every day from now on, and spread it out so I’ll have them all done by the end of the fiscal year.

Today’s class is about Microsoft’s End User Customer Idemnification Policy. A lot of heavy words. I’ll try to explain what it means.

• Customers don’t want to be caught in the middle of an intellectual property legal dispute. Many Microsoft customers have asked about ways of reducing their risk.
• Microsoft has expanded intellectual property (IP) indemnification for end-user customers—it is really an indemnification commitment.
• Microsoft’s commitment means that Microsoft will stand behind its end-user customers if there is an intellectual property dispute involving our client and server software.

It’s because intellectual property disputes can come in many forms. Microsoft’s indemnification commitment includes coverage for most patent, copyright, trade secret, and trademark disputes. It basically means that if someone alleges that software you licensed from Microsoft infringes on their intellectual property rights, then Microsoft will help protect you from the legal costs and liability associated with the dispute.

If you are interested in the details, you can find them at http://www.microsoft.com/indemnification.

Tomorrow I’ll take the Vista course and try to finish it within the estimated 4 hours, although my colleagues say it’ll take a lot more. You’ll see me blogging as I get along with it. I’ll share all the useful stuff I find in it.