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Microsoft kills off Office Genuine Advantage

by on21 December 2010


End of an error
Without telling a soul, Microsoft has killed off its Office Genuine Advantage programme.

Office Notifier, the OGA ActiveX control for Internet Explorer, and the OGA plug-in for Firefox have been scrapped. When OGA still existed, it required users to validate their copy of Microsoft Office to download noncritical updates and other downloads such as addons, samples, templates, and so on.

Now even if Microsoft office is pirated, users can get all the updates. It is not the same as Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) which is required for much more useful downloads than OGA, such as Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

According to Microsoft all the OGA was supposed to do was notify many customers around the world whether their copy of Microsoft Office was genuine. However the program has served its purpose.

In actual fact it appears that OGA was costing Microsoft more money than it was saving. The problem there was little "Advantage" in Office Genuine Advantage as the majority of Office users didn't need extra templates and samples.

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