Automatic sharing of online resources in a multi-user computer system

摘要

A software tool assists users of a computer network to share items from each others' personal workspaces without requiring manual interaction on the users' part to receive and store items therein. An authoring user enters a command to share the object with "target recipients" and identifies the target recipients. Thereafter, the computer system creates records corresponding to the shared object in the workspaces of the target recipients. The records include pointers to the shared object. When a target recipient elects to open the records, it causes the computer system to access the author's workspace and create a copy of the personal object for the target recipient, who is then free to interact with the copy as if it were in his own personal workspace. Significantly, the target recipient does not participate in the distribution of the personal object from the author's workspace to his own. There is no administrative overhead as is required commonly in e-mail distribution systems.