Office of Public Records
Public User’s Meeting
March 16, 2005
2:00 p.m. - Randolph Building Conference Center

The Public Users Meeting was held at 2:00 p.m. in the 1st floor conference room 1D04/D14, Randolph Building on the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia. Ted Parr, OPR Director, chaired the meeting. There were approximately 10 members of the public in attendance and 10 USPTO staff.

UPWS Beta Testing

Mr. Parr introduced Julie Fraser who gave results of recent Universal Public Workstation (UPWS) beta testing. The beta testing was completed on 3/01/2005.

Several categories of issues came out of the test results. They included application issues, issues with UPWS hardware or software and duplication issues. These issues will be included on the Public Search Facility (PSF) issues list to be further investigated. UPWS 2.6 is scheduled to go out this weekend. A notice will be posted in the PSF to that effect.

A problem with printing large documents of approximately 2GB will be more thoroughly checked to see if it is a network printing issue or local printer issue.

Data Center Relocation Impacts

The USPTO Data Center will be moving in a series of discrete moves in May and July and some of these moves will impact systems used by the public. The moves will take place over weekends and related systems will be moved, to the extent possible, on any given weekend to minimize impacts.

Public Search Facility Update

Martha Sneed, Director, Office of Public Information Services, noted that there is new UPWS functionality that will enable emailing to select uspto.gov addresses via the UPWS text transfer functionality. A flyer is going out to provide instructions. UPWS customers can request that the email address be added to their user profile.

Comment: X-Search does not search by preference.

A new version of X-Search should fix this.

Comment: UPWS Control-P is printing an entire PDF in PAIR when only selected documents are desired.

The USPTO is still investigating this issue.

OPR’s Move to South Tower

OPR’s move is completed. All products are back in full production although there is a backlog of Assignment copies due to a move-related issue that has since been solved.

Customer delivery boxes will be transferred from the Crystal Arcade facility to the Alexandria campus by the end of the month. The new address is 551A John Carlyle Street. Notices will be placed in the old boxes prior to the move. Some box numbers may change.

Question: In the File Information Unit (FIU), when looking at pending IFW applications the table of contents no longer opens up. How do we get the table of contents?

The table of contents on IFW CDs are actually PDF bookmarks. Opening the bookmarks will effectively display the table of contents. [Note: OPR has requested that the system be changed to open the bookmarks by default when the PDF file is created.]

The meeting adjourned at 2:19 p.m.

KEY: =online business system =fees =forms=help =laws/regulations =definition (glossary)

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