Your Inbox

Once you have logged into our case management facility you will go straight to your personal IPONZ inbox. This will give you fast access to your cases and will be the central point from which you can manage your IP Applications. The screen is split into three areas:

• Tasks
• Discussions and
• the Navigation Bar.

1. Tasks

As you move through the process of applying for and maintaining an IP case, at times you will be required to submit additional information to complete your application. For example when:

• You need to respond to an examination report
• Your application was not complete and you need to resubmit.

The office will issue a Task to you each time the onus is on you in progressing your application. Each task will have a Task Due Date. If you do not submit a response to the Task it will be removed from your Task list once that date is passed. Usually this means you can no longer pursue your application.

To respond to a task you should click the Task title. The content of the task will explain what your next steps should be.

Administrator has access to all tasks for the organisation and he/she can quickly identify which user is the case contact for a particular case. If you can’t see a task that should belong to you, it’s likely that it is with the Administrator, contact your Administrator to delegate the case to you.

If you have a lot of Tasks you may wish to search for Tasks within your inbox, select Search Tasks and you will be given a range of criteria to search by. Don’t forget to clear the criteria when searching again, or trying to see your whole inbox.

2. Discussions

IPONZ will no longer be sending you paper based correspondence. As you move through the process of applying for and maintaining an IP, you will receive electronic communication from the office.

Each formal communication will be sent in the form of a Discussion – you will always receive an email notification when you have a new discussion.

Your Discussions will show as 'Read' or 'Unread' much like email. You can select to mark discussions as Read or Unread.

You can select the Discussion title to read the content. Discussions may have documents attached. Examples of Discussions are:

• Notification that your Trade Mark application was submitted.
• Notification that your Trade Mark was registered (with Registration Certificate and letter attached).

Normally your Discussions will have a status of Closed, occasionally IPONZ may wish to contact you informally to try and resolve an issue with your case. These discussions will have a status of Open. When you open these discussions you can reply to the questions from the office.

If you have a lot of Discussions you may wish to search for Discussions within your inbox, select Search Discussions and you will be given a range of criteria to search by. Don’t forget to clear the criteria when searching again, or trying to see your whole inbox.

3. Navigation Bar

The left hand side of your inbox is the navigation bar for navigating around IPONZ’s services.

It has been organised into the following sections:

1. My Account – this section contains information about yourself and your organisation (default client) that linked to you. This is where you can maintain your account details and maintain your client records.

You can also access the following functionalities:

• My Profile
  • For user, modify you contact details such as email or phone number.
  • For organisations, you can add new users and delegate cases here.
• My Case Portfolio
  • This is where you can search for all cases that belong to your organisation. For example, to search for IP change request such as change of ownership, select “GR – IP Change of Ownership” option under the Case Type and select Search. A list of all change of ownership requests made by your organisation will be presented. This is a great way to keep track and oversee your organisation’s cases with IPONZ.

• My Subscriptions
  • My Subscriptions is a service where you can create your own subscriptions for watching any changes to an individual case or a collection of cases; or by any changes to classes; and specifications.
  • You can have up to 5 subscriptions at any time, and watch up to 5 classes or up to 1,000 cases per subscription.
  • An email notification will be sent to notify you of any changes and you will be able to view your subscriptions results via the My Notification screen.
• My Notifications
  • This is where you can view your subscriptions results.
• Maintain Client
  • This is where authorised parties or you can maintain client record details such as legal name, and addresses which will reflect across their whole IP portfolio.
• Search Fees
  • This is where you can search for fees, invoices, or payments made by your organisation. You can search by various attributes such as IP case number, email address or client name. If you wish to print out a copy of the invoice you can do so by selecting the fee details to the invoices section.

2. Trade Mark – in this section you can search, apply for a trade mark, apply for International Registration, maintain or renew a trade mark application. 

Read more about trade marks

3. Patent – in this section you can search, apply for a patent, maintain or renew a patent application. 

Read more about patents.

4. Design – in this section you can search, apply for a design, maintain or renew a design application. 

Read more about designs

5. Plant Variety Rights – in this section you can search, apply for a PVR, maintain or renew a PVR application.  

Read more about PVRs

6. Proceedings – in this section you can lodge an opposition application, maintain your proceeding case or file proceeding documents. 

Read more about proceedings in our case management system

7. Information Requests – in this section you can interact with the register as follows:

• View published information - Online Journal
  • IPONZ advertises information at various stages in the lifecycle of an IP, you can search and view that information here.
  • Select Case Type to search by IP type, you can also search by Journal Section within a selected Published period of your choice.
  • You can also Send the Result List by email to yourself or anyone directly from here. Read more on how to search the Journal.

• Request Certified IP Document 
  • You may request a copy of a document from your case file with an IPONZ certification code on it. This will make that document public, and allow you to give the code to a third party so they can see it online.
  • You will have to search for the case then you will be able to request for a certified copy of a document from IPONZ.
• Validate Certified IP Document
• Submit a certified document code here to see a certified document

• Request information
  • You may make Official Information Requests on IP information here. If the information is already publicly available via our site your request will be declined, so please ensure you search for the information first.