Microsoft Subnet received an e-mail from a Microsoft representative wanting to offer more information on Office Genuine
The e-mail offered a link to the WSUS Product Team Blog, which explained that Office Genuine Advantage notifications (OGAN) was accidentally released to U.S. users when Microsoft had previously said it would only be released via a pilot program in Italy, Spain, Turkey and Chile. The WSUS blog post states:
On April 15th the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) notifications update (KB949810) was inadvertently published to WSUS servers for approximately twenty-four hours. This update was intended for Microsoft Office users in the pilot countries of Italy, Spain, Turkey and Chile, but because of WSUS publication, it became available to WSUS managed clients inside and outside of these intended countries. This update has since been removed from WSUS. For servers which synchronized the OGA update package, the package required a EULA acceptance before it could be made available to WSUS managed clients, via either manual approval, or auto-approval rules. OGA notifications are designed to alert customers who are using non-genuine software, and are thus more vulnerable to activation exploits and the risks of counterfeit. As such, this update was marked critical for WSUS.
More information on OGAN is available via an online article. That article states that if OGA decides that your copy of Office is not legitimate, it will send a series of reminders to you. The only way to turn those reminders off is to follow the steps Microsoft requires to validate your software. You software may have initially been validated and then, at some later date, WSUS or OGA may decide it is not legitimate software after all. Among the information in that article is this nugget:
You cannot uninstall the Office Genuine Advantage Notifications application
You can use Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel to view the Office Genuine Advantage Notifications application. However, you cannot use Add or Remove Programs to uninstall the application. This is because pirated software can use Add or Remove Programs to remove the Office Genuine Advantage Notifications application. Because this behavior poses a security threat, the ability to use Add or Remove Programs to remove the Office Genuine Advantage Notifications application has been blocked.
It does make sense that pirated software is less secure software — full of Trojans and other malware. Some research supports the notion that many people think they bought legit software when they haven’t. The problem with WSUS and OGA (and their notifications) is that, when these systems make a mistake, legitimate users suffer. Of all the ideas that Microsoft has had on the topic of ending piracy (while preserving EULAs), notifications seem to be the least intrusive. They simply send messages to users that the software is “not genuine.”
But still, the more Microsoft wants to clamp down and make sure it is being paid every cent it feels it deserves, the more users will be open to checking out alternative forms of software, using alternative licensing models. Users don’t want to have to worry that the software they have paid for and validated won’t be available when they want it.
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