The vendor has begun notifying corporate customers worldwide that they are required to patch new corporate installations of Office Professional 2003 and Access 2003 to install Service Pack 2.

Those with new installations of Office XP Professional and Access 2002 are required to install a separate patch.

The notification follows a California court ruling ordering Microsoft to pay a Guatemalan inventor US$8.9 million (NZ$13 million) for infringing his 1994 patent of software to help transfer data between Excel spreadsheets and the Access database using a single spreadsheet. The court required Microsoft to remove the patented software.

Microsoft New Zealand managing director Ross Peat says the company doesn't have a feel for the numbers affected locally but expects them to be relatively limited.

"We see it affecting a very small number of customers," he says.