Office Genuine Advantage Program Shut Down

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Microsoft has quietly shut down the Office Genuine Advantage program. You can now go download templates and add-ons for Microsoft Office without having to verify that your legally purchased Microsoft Office program is in fact genuine.

The sudden abandonment of the program appears to have taken other parts of Microsoft by surprise. As of this morning, there’s no hint of the OGA shutdown at Microsoft’s official Office Genuine Advantage Validation Issues forum. And if you search Bing for validate office, you’ll turn up a lot of dead links. The first result from Bing is a page entitled “Why validate Office?” But clicking that link, http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/office/WhyValidate.aspx, leads to Microsoft’s Windows home page.