The present invention relates to systems and methods for interactive collaboration within a secure, online social networking community integrated with a document management system and made up of virtual identities enabled with multiple social networking functionalities, document management functionalities, and integrative functionalities.
Social networking web sites, such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, are communities of persons having virtual identities enabled with social networking functionalities. Such sites are often geared towards users having special recreational or social interests such as baseball games, motorcycle riding or dating. There are also social networking web sites for professionals—for example, LinkedIn.com, EsqChat.com and LegallyMinded.com—and some of these sites are communities of persons having virtual identities enabled with social networking functionalities. However, such social networking web sites do not include integration with a secured document management system, which integration provides synergies that facilitate viral online growth, as well as the foundation for the conception and creation of integration functionalities that facilitate business networking, operations and transactions.
The prior art also discloses document management systems, meaning systems for managing, creating, editing, deleting, saving, organizing and accessing documents. For instance, Microsoft Office®, more particularly, its Word®, Excel®, and Power Point® applications, allow for creating, editing, deleting, saving and accessing of documents. Microsoft Office® also includes an Outlook® application that allows creating, editing, deleting, saving, accessing, sending and receiving emails. Another prior art system, Interwoven, Inc., offers a document management system that allows for organizing, storing and retrieving documents.
The preceding document management systems are generally examples of stand-alone document systems, most of which are only available as stand-alone systems that require a dedicated network and are not available online. Thus many systems offering document management systems are not available with the type of economies of scale obtainable when offered to a larger community online. Some systems provide some functionalities of a document management system in an online context. For instance, Google.com and OpenOffice.org offer applications for creating, editing, deleting, saving and accessing documents in an online context, and for creating, editing, deleting, saving, accessing, sending and receiving emails in an online context. For instance, HyperOffice.com offers an online document organization system for organizing, storing and retrieving documents online. However, such document management systems that operate in an online context are not offered in the context of integration with a networking community made up of virtual identities enabling social networking functionalities, enhanced with the integrative functionalities described below. Thus, the prior art lacks a means to allow a user to enable a single online virtual identity, via entry of a single username and password, that allows the user to manage documents in multiple secure online document management databases, where each document management database is shared by a different organization (or other group of users), and where each organization desires to keep documents confidential to the organization secure from and inaccessible by the other organizations as a wholes. Thus, the prior art also lacks a means of allowing the user the ability to easily move a document from one such secure online document management database to another.
Prior art document management systems operate by providing a folder system. In many cases, the document management system makes files available to one or more members of an organization. For example, a corporation might provide a document management system using Windows Explorer or a similar folder-based system, hosted on the corporation's servers. In other cases, a corporation may use a centralized, server-based document management system such as Interwoven Filesite, which typically organizes files according to client, matter, or similar groupings. The document management system may be hosted remotely, as in a cloud-based system. In each of these prior art systems, the documents are kept in an ordered set of files so that all members have access to the same set of document, filed according to the same system or convention. However, there are advantages to letting the users customize the filing system to the user's own preferences. Current document management systems lack an efficient method for allowing customization of the folders without adding unnecessary multiplication of folders, which causes clutter to the system and confusion to other users.
Contact file management systems disclosed in the prior art, such as Outlook®, allow the management of contact files, each of which contain contact information that may be imported into document management systems and word processing applications like Word®. However, in regard to a particular person, contact file management systems like Outlook® require each of tens or hundreds or even thousands of contacts of the particular person to create, maintain and/or update a contact file corresponding to the person. Software applications like Plaxo® facilitate the process of allowing each of many contacts of a single person to more easily update contact information of the single person. However, Outlook® and Plaxo® each (and collectively) have it backwards, so to speak, in that they require many contacts of a single person to collectively create, maintain, and/or update many contact files each corresponding to the single person. Thus, there is need for an invention that allows the single person to maintain a single contact file, which single contact file could be accessed by all of the contacts of the single person, the contact information of which single contact file is importable into document management systems and word processing applications of each of the contacts.
Thus there remains a need for a document management system integrated into a truly cooperative community of virtual identities that enable a plurality of social networking functionalities. There furthermore remains a need for a method for allowing users to create customized folders within the document management system without also affecting the organization of documents and folders as viewed by other users of the system. Finally, there remains a need for the integrative functionalities the creation of which is conceivable and made possible in the context of such integration, which integrative functionalities will facilitate business networking, operations and transactions, and allow cloud computing portals for document management systems to more fully tap the viral power of the internet as enabled by social networking functionalities.