The European Patent Office (EPO) announced yesterday that it has updated its online training schedule for the month of April. As noted in the EPO news release (link below), the EPO will be resuming its “virtual classrooms” training events next month, the first event to be held of April 1st.

As the individual virtual classroom description webpages do not have unique web links (they are all located through the “Patent event search” webpage provided below), I will reference each of the three planned events for April. To see the individual webpages yourself, please go to the Patent Event Search link below, and in the “Medium” drop-down menu (bottom-right corner of the search page), select “Online training” and click “search.” The three events below will appear in the “Search results” section below the search drop-down menus.

(Please note that the schedule below may have changed - click the link for a current schedule - MR)

April 1, 2008: “esp@cenet 1 - In the beginning” – this session will teach the basics of esp@cenet, which is described as “a free to use internet service providing access to nearly 60 million patent documents from around the world stretching back in some cases to the 19th century”

April 4, 2008: “esp@cenet 2 - So you think you know all esp@cenet?” – this session will teach provide additional details regarding the new features and functions available in esp@cenet

April 29, 2008: “Register Plus & WebRegMT” – this session will provide information regarding Register Plus (“the place where the EPO stores all the publicly available information it has on European patent applications as they pass through the grant procedure”) and WebRegMT, the EPO Register alert service useful to “automatically monitor changes to files in the European Patent Register as they occur”

Each session listed above will run from 10:00AM to 11:30 Vienna, Austria local time.

EPO News Release: LINK
EPO Patent Event Search: LINK