Appeal 2007-0954
Application 09/999,074
The Examiner further contends that Guheen provides various tools for,
among other things, administering distributed systems and managing user
accounts (Answer 17).
We will sustain the Examiner’s rejection of representative claim 1. At
the outset, we find the Examiner’s interpretation of “identity profile” as
corresponding to the behavioral description of a circuit design problematic
essentially for the reasons noted by Appellants.7 Nevertheless, we find that
Berg amply discloses not only this limitation, but all other limitations of
claim 1 giving the terms their broadest reasonable interpretation.
Berg discloses a workflow management system that includes a
workflow manager 70 that utilizes a flow management engine 84 (Berg, col.
6, ll. 38-51; Fig. 3). The flow management engine maintains a workflow
instance database that stores information about an instance of a workflow.
Significantly, the flow management engine keeps track of, among other
things, the identification of a user (e.g., the user’s login name) executing
each particular step in a flow. The flow management engine also maintains,
among other things, the identification of the user who opened the workflow
(Berg, col. 7, ll. 1-25).
Berg’s tracking and maintenance of user identifications associated
with respective workflow instances fully meets the limitations calling for
managing an identity profile and the workflow performing a first task on an
identity profile as claimed. When a user executes any given workflow, a
“first task” is certainly performed on the “identity profile” maintained by the
7 According to Appellants’ Specification, an “identity profile” is “a set of
information associated with a particular entity (e.g., user, group,
organization, etc.).” (Specification 10: 31-32).
7
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