Appeal No. 2006-1123
Application No. 09/766,934
We note that these represent instances of customer specific bill formatting.
For all of the above reasons, we conclude that Ensel does teach client specific bill
formatting as claimed, and customer specific formatting as argued, but not claimed.
Appellant argues that Ensel does not teach or suggest the creation of objects.
(See brief at page 5).
Ensel states in col. 10, lines 51-65:
The Summary file includes the highest level representation of the
customer's bill. Examples of the type of data included in the Summary file
210 are the customer's name, account number, location (address) of the
bill destination, account balance, current amount due, amount past due,
and minimum due. The E-Bill file 215 contains data related to the
customer's current E-Bills along with historical E-Bill data which is retained
for a certain period of time. The E-Bill data residing in this file 215 contains
the detailed description of the customer's bill (e.g., details of all of the
charges on a credit card for the applicable period in the case of a credit
card biller). In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the
E-Bill file 215 is an object oriented file in which the E-Bills are stored
as objects.
We note that the fact that the data used for bill contents are stored as objects in
an object oriented file indicates that the objects are instantiated, i.e. created or
generated, when invoked. Further evidence of this is reflected at Ensel col. 13,
lines 57-62:
Application `plug-ins` residing on application server 240 accomplish the
actual formatting of the electronic bills. The plug-ins contain the software
required to format the data in E-Bill 215 and Summary 210 files for the
channel of distribution to which an electronic bill is to be published. There
is a different plug-in for each channel of distribution.
We note that such plug-ins require an application programming interface that
provides protocols that must be invoked by software that is structured as objects,
whether by that name or another, further evidencing the generation of objects to collect
data pertinent to the client and the bill format.
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