System for sharing content tabs

#This disclosure relates to sharing information among computer users, and, more particularly, to sharing content tabs among users of a computer system.

#Present computer systems can provide voluminous amounts of information to users. The relative ease of serving information over the World Wide Web or using a web-type interface as a window into an information database fuels the development of electronic information dissemination systems. The amount of information that system users demand continues to grow, however. Therefore, a continuing need exists for optimizing the organization of the voluminous information so that it can best benefit the users.

#A common way to present information to users is to have the users operate a browser window that shows a series of formatted pages of information. An improvement to forcing a user to proceed through a series of pages is the use of a tab metaphor, which is a navigational aid that provides a conceptual categorization of information. In this improvement, a series of tabs are placed in a display window as an interface to multiple documents. Selecting one of the tabs causes an associated page to appear in the display window. Just as in the physical world where writing on paper tabs of folders indicates the contents of papers kept within the particular folders, computer generated tabs are used to indicate the contents of a page displayed when the tab is selected.

#The description may be best understood by reading the disclosure with reference to the drawings, wherein:

#FIG. 1 is a view of an information screen that includes tabs.

#FIG. 2 is a functional block diagram of an information system that can be used to implement embodiments of the invention.

#FIG. 2 is a functional block diagram of an information system 5. A content server 30 stores information content that can be ultimately delivered to a user of the information system 5. Some or all of the information content stored by the content server 30 may be stored in a storage repository 32, which may or may not be separate from the content server 30 itself. The content server 30 can, of course, store any type of information for use by the users, such as text, data, static or moving images, audio data, templates, forms, etc.

#The content server 30 is coupled to a portal control 40, which can format the content stored on the content server for use by users of the information system 5. The portal control 40 includes various functions useful in the operation of the system 5 such as, for example, an HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) or “web” server that delivers HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) pages to users in response to user input, a JAVA application server (J2EE) that implements java code and scripts initiated by a user's machine, etc. The portal control 40 can be implemented by computer programs running on a computer system, for instance. Additionally coupled to the portal control 40 is a user profile storage facility 42, which stores user preferences, pages, templates, forms, and other information, including the tabs 15 that each user has selected to appear on a personal user page.

#Users A and B each have views 50 displayed on their machines (not shown) that are automatically brought up when the user connects to the portal control 40 and the content server 30 using a document viewer or browser. The browser could be running on a typical computer or workstation, e.g. The views 50 are similar to a “home page” on a typical World Wide Web system. An example view 50 is illustrated in FIG. 3. In the view 50 are a set of tabs 15 that have been customized for a particular user. A user can customize his or her view 50 in several ways, one of which is to design which tabs 15 will be present in the view, and what content that the page, portions 18 of the tabs will contain.