International Business Machines Corporation

Niklas Heidloff

Michael R O'Brien

Gregory Robert Klouda

David Andrew Brooks

Oliver Kieselbach

Igor Belakovskiy

Shruti Kumar

Carl Kraenzel

Hong Dai

Craig Richard Wolpert

James Patrick Galvin, Jr

Hardy Groeger

Patrick Joseph O'Sullivan

Paul Brian Moody

Stanley Kieran Jerrard-Dunne

Stephen T Auriemma

Kristina Beckley

Kannepalli Venkata Sreekanth

Thomas Jeffrey Calow

Bhavan K Kumar

Kathryn A Glickman

A system for automatically providing notifications to a user regarding interesting content, which automatically collects information regarding persons that are important to the user, as well as indications of important content sources. The important content sources are then monitored for actions performed by one of the important persons for the user, and notifications are generated to the user in the event that the important person performs an action on a document or other information item stored in the important content source. Important persons for a user may be determined through a communication application used by the user, such as an electronic mail program, instant messaging program, or the like, in response to indications of persons that the user has either sent messages to and/or received messages from. The notifications may be provided through the user's communication application, by electronic mail messages, instant messages, or the like. The notification may include a name, identifier, or other indication of the important person that performed the action on the important content source. Notifications may be provided to the user in response to any specific kind of action by the important persons on an important content source, such as create operations, modify operations, and/or delete operations.

Automatically providing notifications regarding interesting content from shared sources based on important persons and important sources for a user

A system for minimizing the time required to initiate and terminate an instant messaging session. An initial message in an instant messaging session is checked to determine whether it has any significant content. If the received initial message has insignificant content, then a non-intrusive notification is provided to the user, without changing the current focus in the user interface. A pre-composed response message may also be automatically transmitted to the initiating user, requesting that a more significant message be sent. When an initial message in an instant messaging session is received that is determined to have significant content, the user is promptly notified in a different manner, which may be intrusive such that the current focus of the user interface is changed to a new window or the like containing the newly initiated instant messaging session.

Minimizing the time required to initiate and terminate an instant messaging session

A system for providing version control for documents attached to electronic mail messages in which a user's personal document library is used to store documents attached to the email messages the user sends and/or receives. Each time an attached document is transmitted or received within a message thread, a different version of the document is created and stored in the personal document library. The multiple document versions created allow the disclosed system to provide the user with the options of opening the most recent version of an attached document and/or opening the version of the attached document that is associated with the specific opened message. An attached document is represented within an email message using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), where the stored URL points to the version of the attached document for that message that is stored in the user's personal document library. Through an API (Application Programming Interface) provided by the personal document library, the most recent version of a document can be requested, or another specific version of the document can be indicated for opening.

Providing version control for electronic mail attachments

A system for minimizing the time required to initiate and terminate an instant messaging session. An initial message in an instant messaging session is checked to determine whether it has any significant content. If the received initial message has insignificant content, then a non-intrusive notification is provided to the user, without changing the current focus in the user interface. A pre-composed response message may also be automatically transmitted to the initiating user, requesting that a more significant message be sent. When an initial message in an instant messaging session is received that is determined to have significant content, the user is promptly notified in a different manner, which may be intrusive such that the current focus of the user interface is changed to a new window or the like containing the newly initiated instant messaging session. Detection of instant messaging session termination by the local user triggers a period of special processing of received instant messages from other participants in the terminated instant messaging session. Instant messages received from other participants in the terminated session during this time period that are insignificant farewell messages are processed without disturbing the local user.

A system for blending synchronous and asynchronous computer communication applications that determines when a user of a synchronous communication application, such as an instant messaging application, attempts to send a message to another user that is unavailable for synchronous communications, and that forwards the message from the synchronous communication application to an asynchronous communication application for delivery. The forwarded message may be an email message, and the system may operate to determine a destination electronic mail address of the destination user for inclusion in the forwarded message, and include an indication in the forwarded message that it has been forwarded from the synchronous communication application. This indication enables the asynchronous communication application to perform special processing with regard to the forwarded message.

Providing blended synchronous/asynchronous messaging

The present invention provides a system and method for allowing integration of loosely coupled components for applications requiring templates and, more specifically, for utilizing the property broker and component technology to solve the missing sandbox model for Lotus Notes out of the box templates on the rich client. It utilizes the property broker and component technology so that components can communicate with one another as standard 'out of the box' templates (such as Notes mail8.ntf and pernames.ntf) are allowed to publish properties automatically, e.g., when the selections in views/folders change. Customers are then allowed to define their own applications via an editor using pre-existing or 'out of the box' components or custom components of disparate technologies. Component views from the out of the box templates can easily be reused by graphically dragging them from a component palette and dropping them onto the page. The composite application is stored in a separate database (in Lotus Notes, the database extension is &#x201c;.nsf&#x201d;) and so there are no template changes to the contacts database necessary.

System and method for allowing the creation of composite applications through the wiring of loosely coupled existing or custom components of disparate  technologies

A system for blending synchronous and asynchronous computer communication applications that determines when a user of a synchronous communication application, such as an instant messaging application, attempts to send a message to another user that is unavailable for synchronous communications, and that forwards the message from the synchronous communication application to an asynchronous communication application for delivery. The forwarded message may be an email message, and the system may operate to determine a destination electronic mail address of the destination user for inclusion in the forwarded message, and include an indication in the forwarded message that it has been forwarded from the synchronous communication application. This indication enables the asynchronous communication application to perform special processing when the receiving user retrieves the forwarded message from the asynchronous communication application. The special processing may include automatically determining whether the sending user is currently available for synchronous communications, and, if so, providing a synchronous communication session between the receiving user and the sending user. If the sending user is not currently available for synchronous communications, the receiving user is provided with the option of responding to the forwarded message using the asynchronous communication application.

Blended synchronous/asynchronous messaging

A system for providing automatic off-line availability of shared document content linked in electronic mail ('email') messages. Documents indicated by links in processed email messages may accessed when a client system user is working either online or offline. A software component operates to read through email messages sent to a client system user, and to locate messages including links to content stored on the server system. The software component accesses the content indicated by the links contained in the email messages, and moves the content onto the client system for offline access. The software component may include a periodically scheduled agent, and/or a component that is called just prior to the client system or email application going offline.

Automatic off-line availability for document content linked in electronic mail messages

A method, system and apparatus for the selective notification of incoming electronic messages. In this regard, a selective message notification method can include selectively generating a notification for a received message based upon pre-determined criteria irrespective of how the received message is handled. The pre-determined criteria can include a manually specified criteria, a rules based criteria, or a profile based criteria.

Selective message notification system

A core idea of present invention is not only to have one fixed link/reference to one specific database, but to use a script/formula (e.g. a Notes @formula/expression) that resolves to a link to a specific database at runtime. This allows pointing to different NSFs in the development environment vs. production environment vs. any other environment. This reference (e.g., the @formula/expression) is written in a new user interface (UI) of the Lotus Notes Composite Application Editor (CAE) that is part of the current UI to define component property preferences. This UI would generate the XML below so that users don't have to do this manually.

Accomodating different resolutions of references to components in composite applications

A method, system and apparatus for the offline securing of messages through selective security data replication. A method for selectively replicating security data for offline processing of electronic messages can include identifying a messaging partner associated with the electronic message responsive to processing an electronic message. Subsequently, it can be determined whether electronic messages previously had been received from or transmitted to the identified messaging partner. If it is determined that electronic messages previously had been received from or transmitted to the identified messaging partner, identifying information for the identified messaging partner can be added to a batch listing. Consequently, during a replication process, security data can be selectively replicated from an external repository to a local repository only for security data associated with messaging partners corresponding to identifying information in the batch listing.

Offline message security via selective data replication

A system for conveniently removing recipients from a message being added to a message thread that enables a user to filter people from a recipient list of a message being added to a message thread. The system advantageously enables a user to filter out potential recipients based on a) their previous non-participation in the thread, b) their lack of registered interest in a topic of the thread, and/or c) their being listed only as recipients by way of their being contained in a group indicated in the recipient list.

Method and system for removing recipients from a message thread

Described is a method for generating a parametric search statement for finding a target document. The parametric search statement is generated in the text boxes of a search bar. A user action is performed in the text box. An in-place context menu having menu items responsive to the user action are displayed near the location of the user action. Each menu item includes at least one of an attribute of the target document, a comparison operator and a value. One of the menu items is selected from the in-place context menu based on a known characteristic of the target document. Parametric search statements are easily generated using the method without the need to access numerous dialogs boxes or to enter significant text.

Search bar with intelligent parametric search statement generation

A method and system for sharing search index entries across multiple computer systems organized in a peer to peer network, in which unique content is indexed only once, even though the content may be physically duplicated in multiple computer systems in the peer to peer network. When files are obtained by a shared indexing service, and a determination is made as to whether the received files are duplicates with regard to previously indexed files. If a file is determined to be a duplicate, the index representation of the previously indexed copy of the file is modified to indicate that the file is also associated with another computer system in the peer to peer network. If a file is not a duplicate of a previously indexed file, the file is indexed to support future searches. The index representation of a file includes category identifiers associating one or more computer systems with the file. When a file is indexed, one or more category identifiers are generated and stored in association with that file. The category identifiers for an indexed file may represent host computer systems on which copies of the file are stored. The category identifiers enable location specific searching by computer systems in a peer to peer network sharing a common search index. A software category filter may be provided to process search results from the shared search index, so that only files associated with certain categories are returned.

Method for providing a shared search index in a peer to peer network

Linked non-shared documents within email messages are made accessible to a recipient. Upon initiation of sending of an email message by a user, the MIME of the email is automatically parsed through to detect URL tags indicating that a linked document is contained within the email message. Upon detection of a URL tag, the prefix of the URL is checked to determine if it is accessible to a recipient. If the prefix indicates that the link is not accessible to the recipient, the sender is provided with at least the following options for making the linked document accessible to the recipient: sending the linked document as an in-line document by converting the document into HTML format and embedding it into a multi part MIME message, sending the linked document as an attachment with a link to a file system or document library, or converting the linked document into a pdf file and sending it as an attachment. If the prefix is set, by default, as one that is not accessible to the recipient, the option of converting the document into HTML format and embedding it into a multi part MIME message may be automatically selected.

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Salzkotten, Germany

Niklas Heidloff