Providing auto-sorting of collaborative partners or components based on frequency of communication and/or access in a collaboration system user interface

Abstract

A system for auto-sorting of lists based on most frequent component access or partner collaboration. The elements in the lists may represent collaboration partners (e.g. instant messaging contacts), and/or collaboration components such as Web addresses, events, collaborative documents, activity objects, and/or desktop applications. The system monitors component accesses and/or partner collaborations over a configurable time period to determine the frequency of collaborations with specific collaboration partners, and/or the frequency of accesses to collaboration components. The disclosed system then determines a set of collaboration partners and/or components that are most frequently collaborated with and/or accessed, and moves the list elements representing those collaboration partners and/or components into a top-located sub-list within a list of elements representing a larger number of collaboration partners and/or components in a user interface provided to a local user. The size of the top-located sub-list is user configurable, and the user may further indicate that certain collaboration partners and/or components are to be added to the sub-list, removed from the sub-list, always excluded from the sub-list, or always included in the sub-list. The local user may also be provided with a configurable set of alert notifications through the user interface communicating when collaboration partners and/or components have been added to and/or removed from the sub-list.