ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,511,216, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"Distributed virtual data tank for cross service quota management" was invented by Jinghua Chen (Redmond, Wash.), Anatoly Victor Koretsky (San Antonio), Srivalli Chavali (Redmond, Wash.), Naresh Sundaram (Redmond, Wash.), Pradeep Kamalakumar (Hyderabad, India) and Steven James Rayson (Redmond, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Disclosed are embodiments that communicate label information for documents between two enterprise computer systems. The two computer systems operate asynchronous from each other, and have limited available resources ...