June 19, 2007
The Fourth Meeting of the Steering Committee of the CARDS national project

In the Office, on June 19th, 2007, the fourth session of the Steering Committee of the CARDS national project for the technical assistance to the Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Serbia was held, which was attended by all the members of the Committee. The introductory speech was given by Ms. Branka Totic, Acting Director of the Office, who emphasized that the period from January to June 2007 was so far the most active phase in the two year of the realization of the Project. The detailed report on activities with the presentation of all the results was presented by the Project Director in the European Patent Office Mr. Pascal Phlix. In the first five months of 2007, from the many realized activities with the very visible results, the most important are the following:

- a project plan was realized for the making of the security system of the Office building, which includes, first of all, the security bars, the control door and cameras on the ground floor, and its realization has been envisaged for the second half of the year and it will be financed by the CARDS national project;
-all the equipment for the new information network for the Office was delivered until the end of the month of May, and about the 15th of May, the transfer of information was initiated, the procurement of working stations was secured and other elements of the existing network were attached to the new network, and it has been planned that this process is finalized by the end of June. Parallel with these tasks, the company Siemens, which is the executor of this operation, performs the education of the employees in the IT Department of the Office so that they can manage and control the work of the new infrastructure: the network, server and working stations;
-digitalization of the data base:
-data base for trademarks has been habilitated for full regime of work in the framework of the Office internal network, and the installation of data base for trademarks and industrial designs on the Internet is under way through the Office publication server;
-scanning of all bibliographic data for patents from the Gazette, just like the scanning of patent documents is done every day and it is expected that this job will be finalized by the end of October 2007, when about 1 200 000 pages would be scanned and ready to be prepared for posting on the publication server of the Office and searchable in the framework of Mimosa on the national level;
-Complete examination of the existing telephone system of the Office has been performed, and as the most suitable new digital central ISDN installation has been chosen, which is planned to be purchased and installed in September;
-In the organization of the CARDS national project , two larger public seminars were held: on trademarks (March 2007) and on the formulation of patent claims (April 2007) and in May, a one day instructive seminar was held in the Office on the importance of intellectual property.

At the end of the fourth meeting, for all the members of the Steering Committee of the CARDS national project, a practical demonstration of the possibilities of the new on line resources was held in the new server hall of the Office, which will be placed on the site of the Office before the end of the realization of this Project , and that is the December 31st, 2007.