1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to document management. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and system for content dissemination by in-document tagging.
2. Related Art
Network-based document dissemination is an increasingly critical part of everyday work. However, current dissemination mechanisms, such as email, networked file systems, document management systems, or workflow systems suffer from several limitations.
In conventional systems, users can only send information at the level of entire documents. To share selected portions of documents, a user is typically required to manually extract the specific content to be shared, e.g. using cut and paste, and sending it to the recipient as a separate document or in an email message. This manual process not only is cumbersome, but also makes it difficult to reestablish context for the information or to incorporate responses into the original content when the recipient replies with comments or changes to the shared content.
In addition, conventional document sharing typically requires special sharing-related interfaces or applications, which are often stand-alone modules and are outside the context in which the information to be shared is actually generated (e.g., a word processor where the document is edited). In addition, most of these interfaces or applications only allow simple distribution of information, whereas specialized functions, such as requests for comments, edits, or approval, are often performed in an ad-hoc fashion using, for example, context provided in an email message.