Computing environment for facilitating collaboration between professional service providers and their clients

摘要

A system for facilitating collaboration has a database in network communication with a server. Relationships between users on the network are defined individually as to pairs of users. Each relationship is unique to the user pair and does not extend to other users. The relationships define networks or teams of users, which cross traditional corporate and network boundaries to link up people who otherwise cannot get connected. Users have user accounts within a database, which stores relationship information for user pairs. Each relationship is unique relative to each pair of users, and users may have more than one relationship. Web based productivity tools provide enhancements to the user environment so that pairs of users can collaborate over the system using the tools according to the established relationships.