CRM UI Runtime Error links to Microsoft Patent Application

It isn’t often that a Bing search I initiate to research a CRM error message points me to a patent application. But today that happened. The following warning message pops up from time to time when I launch Outlook 2010 on my work notebook computer.

The Bing search returned only one match as follows:

Which when I searched further I uncovered a  US Patent Application Publication published on Dec. 8, 2011.

Here is a link to the full patent application and a snippet from the first page appears below:

What is a patent application? This is what Wikipedia has to say about it.

“A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for the invention described and claimed by that application. An application consists of a description of the invention (the patent specification), together with official forms and correspondence relating to the application. The term patent application is also used to refer to the process of applying for a patent, or to the patent specification itself (i.e. the content of the document filed with a view to initiating the process of applying for a patent [1]).”

Disclaimer: I have been beating pretty hard on my Windows 7 machine for 3+ years. A lot of applications get installed and re-installed and I am always evaluating not only our own CRM extensions but also ones from other companies. As a consequence I see a lot of stuff happening that a regular CRM would user would never see.