Collaboration Cards for Centralized Document Communication
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current collaboration tools for document authoring applications lack efficiency in allowing collaborators to access and integrate communication related to a document from multiple sources in a centralized manner, making it difficult to manage comments and changes across various applications.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of collaboration cards that enable users to share comments and receive replies through various communication channels, allowing the integration of feedback directly into the document within the document authoring application, facilitating seamless communication and content management among collaborators.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If communication between collaborators is dispersed across multiple applications, then collaborators can use different communication channels, but it becomes difficult to access all communication around a document in one place
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges communication from multiple channels (email, text messages, postings) into a single collaboration card that consolidates all communication around a document in one place, allowing users to access and manage all communications through a unified interface
Solution Approach 2:
The collaboration card serves as a universal container that can receive and display communications from various sources and channels, making it adaptable to different communication methods while providing a consistent access point
2Adaptability or versatility
If collaboration tools integrate multiple communication channels, then communication versatility improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The collaboration card acts as an intermediary component that receives communications from multiple channels and presents them in a unified format, simplifying the system architecture by introducing a mediating layer that handles the complexity of multi-channel integration
3Adaptability or versatility
If collaborators use multiple applications for communication, then communication flexibility is maintained, but processor load and memory usage increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts communication content from multiple separate applications and consolidates it into a single collaboration card, reducing the need to maintain and process communications across multiple application instances, thereby decreasing processor load and memory usage
Data Source
AI summary
Collaboration cards are provided to enable people to collaborate and receive instant replies to comments or questions from anywhere in a collaboratively generated document. A collaborator may add somebody's name to a collaboration card and ask that person for information, for example. That person may receive the question/comment via an email, a text message, a posting, or comparable communication methods, and respond back with the requested information through the same communication channel or another communication channel. The replied content may be placed into the collaboration card created in the document, and the original sender may be enabled to accept a change to the document content based on the collaboration card.