[Patentcenter] Patent Center eOffice Action will be delayed May 22, 2024?

[Carl Oppedahl]

There is a banner item that just today got posted to Patent Center's 
main screen:

    Patent Center eOffice Action will be delayed May 22, 2024 due to
    USPTO system maintenance.  e-Notifications will begin approximately
    at 10am E.T.

I sort of can't figure out why this got singled out as a failing of 
Patent Center that needed to get acknowledged.  We have all seen 
oddities where the Patent Center system is late (by a day or two 
sometimes) in letting the practitioner know that outgoing correspondence 
got stuck into the IFW file.  And we have all seen oddities where the 
Patent Center system tells us about something very important that 
happened in our patent file that the USPTO wants us to know about, and 
we don't get told until days later, or we get told twice, and the second 
time we get told is days or weeks after the fact.  And Suzannah noted 
that apparently the "welcome letter" has risen to such a level of 
importance that it gets communicated to the practitioner a second time, 
some weeks after the first time it got communicated.

But now today all of a sudden the Patent Center developers feel that 
this particular delay (of a mere few hours) deserves to be singled out 
for a special banner item?

And by the way, what is "eOffice Action" exactly, if it is not the exact 
same thing as OCN (outgoing correspondence notification)?

There are outgoing correspondence notifications that are for things 
other than Office Actions.  For example you might be on the receiving 
end of a Notice to File Missing Parts, or one of those letters where 
they tell you that some NTFMP has been withdrawn. Or a Filing Receipt.  
Those OCNs are not (I guess) the same thing as an "eOffice Action".  But 
does this banner item mean that there will be a several-hour delay for 
some OCNs but not others?  You will get notified today the 22nd right 
away (as usual) about outgoing correspondence that is not an Office 
Action, but if the outgoing correspondence is an Office Action, your 
notification will arrive several hours late?

In our office, these days we have gotten to the point where our distrust 
of the OCNs runs so high that we feel we have no choice but to log in at 
Patent Center manually and click around to look for outgoing 
correspondence and status changes ourselves.  Because we just cannot 
trust that we would ever hear about an item of outgoing correspondence 
in a timely way by means of an outgoing correspondence notification.

In the old days of PAIR, it seemed to be good enough to do this manual 
OC check once, a minute or two past midnight in Virginia, and if there 
was any OC, we would see it.

With Patent Center, it seems to be erratic.  Some OCs will be visible a 
minute or two past midnight, yes.  But then if we log back in at Patent 
Center several hours past midnight, another dump of OCs seems to have 
taken place.  And then when banker's hours arrive in Virginia, a third 
dump of OCs into IFW will sometimes happen, I guess because USPTO 
developers arrive at their desk at 9 or 10AM and sort of notice that a 
dumpload of OCs somehow never got posted into IFW so it happens during 
banker's hours.

Anyway I thought it was sort of quaint or cute that this particular 
delay got singled out for disclosure in a banner item in Patent Center.

But I welcome any comment from a fellow user of Patent Center if they 
can shed light on this question of what is "eOffice Action" exactly, if 
it is not the exact same thing as an OCN (outgoing correspondence 
notification)?


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