Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Eric J Hennings

Michael D Smith

Michael A Angiulo

Christine McKee

Loren Kohnfelder

Ray Sun

Sean L Flynn

Eric Robert Berman

Sanjay G Shenoy

Michael J Wallent

Michael D Pinckney

The present application describes a work management/tracking framework that allows users to organize work around goals that may utilize several applications. Goals may encompass smaller individual tasks that span more than one application. An action object is used to represent a goal and can have one or more task items associated with it. The task items associated with an action object represent tasks that are included in the events and processes necessary to accomplish the goal. As a user works, the tasks that the user works on are tracked. If the user has requested to maintain the tasks in an action object, the tasks are associated with an action object. The user is assisted in pulling in possible task items that the user may wish to associate with an action object by being provided with a list of selectable task items that may be related to the action object.

Integrated work management and tracking

The integrity of uniform resource locator (URL) references within web sites are maintained when changes occur in the locations where resources referenced by URLs are stored. A Referential Preservation Engine (RPE) maintains a database in which the location of web site documents and reference information are stored and updates various URL hyperlink references contained in the web pages on the site so that users can locate documents that have been moved to new storage locations. The RPE can also update links to external web sites by communicating with an RPE running on each external site. The RPE on the external site keeps track of the movement of linked documents on the sites and passes information pertaining to the new location of the linked documents to the local site, whereupon the links on the local web site pages are updated to reflect the new storage locations. The RPE also can track usage of a user's favorite sites and/or documents that are stored in an Internet browser and update the URL references for these favorites when the resources they are mapped to are moved (or renamed).

Method for preserving referential integrity within web sites

Contextual information concerning linked documents is promoted to display pages that contain hyperlinks to those documents. The contextual information can be immediately displayed, or it can be selectively displayed in response to a user selecting a text hyperlink anchor or a picture icon hyperlink anchor. Furthermore, the contextual information can include a variety of information about the linked document, including whether it has been modified within a predefined time period, such as the last 24 hours, a comment by the author concerning recent changes, and the size of the document. Preferably, the contextual information is automatically generated by a data promotion engine based on meta-data that is associated with the document and stored on a web site for the document. One of the types of contextual information stored in the meta-data is a manually defined category for a hyperlink in the display page.

Method for promoting contextual information to display pages containing hyperlinks

Contextual information concerning linked documents is promoted to display pages that contain hyperlinks to those documents. The contextual information can be immediately displayed, or it can be selectively displayed in response to a user selecting a text hyperlink anchor or a picture icon hyperlink anchor. Furthermore, the contextual information can include a variety of information about the linked document, including whether it has been modified within a predefined time period, such as the last 24 hours, a comment by the author concerning recent changes, and the size of the document. Preferably, the contextual information is automatically generated by a data promotion engine based on meta-data that is associated with the document and stored on a web site for the document. The contextual information may be either added to the document that corresponds to a display page at the time the document page is saved, or it may be dynamically uploaded to a browser when the display page is rendered by a browser. One of the types of contextual information stored in the meta-data is a manually defined category for a hyperlink in the display page.

A system and method of saving a Web page from a Web site on an Internet to a computer-readable medium is disclosed. A Web page is downloaded from the Internet to the computer-readable medium. The Internet address for the Web page is stored on the computer-readable medium. When the Web page is opened from the computer-readable medium, the Internet address is used to identify a security context for the Web page. By using the Internet address to identify the security context for the Web page, the system and method of the present invention allows users to securely view and execute Web pages downloaded from the Internet.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Eric J Hennings