Appeal 2006-3144
Application 09/778,281
ANALYSIS
With respect to independent claims 1 and 8, Appellants’ arguments in
response to the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection initially assert a
failure by the Examiner to establish a prima facie case of obviousness since
all of the claimed limitations are not taught or suggested by the applied prior
art references. In particular, Appellants focus on the alleged deficiency of
Tatham in disclosing the claimed feature of storing template data defining
template web pages which implement activities for user participation.
According to Appellants (Br. 9-10; Reply Br. 3-4), the workgroup creation
template 170 of Tatham referenced by the Examiner is merely a fill-in-the
blanks form completed by a user to create a workgroup.
As explained by the Examiner (Answer 11-12), however, in the
showing of correspondence with the claimed subject matter, Tatham’s
disclosure (col. 4, ll. 55-60) of the workgroup creation template 10 is used
along with the disclosure of the dedicated site 180 which, in the terminology
used by Tatham, is considered a customizable private office suite (Tatham,
col. 4, ll. 19-34 and col. 4, ll. 66 through col. 5, ll. 26). With this in mind,
we see no error in the Examiner’s finding that the workgroup creation
template 170 in Tatham is a template which defines web pages since it is
used to create the private office suite.
It is further our view that the ordinarily skilled artisan would
recognize and appreciate, from Tatham’s description of the applications
contained in the private office suite, that such customizable private office
suite contains web pages which implement activities for user participation.
As just one example, the project collaboration tool included in Tatham’s
private office suite is described as providing a “Web sit(sic) environment for
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