Patent ID: 7836130

Claim:
A method for providing collaboration services to a software application executed in a computer system, the method comprising: executing an application programming interface (API) at the computer system for a software object to provide functions to the software application to create a first collaboration service node corresponding to a first software object node of the first software object; with usage of functions provided by the API, linking the first collaboration service node to a second collaboration service node of a collaboration software object to represent a link structure between the first software object node and a second software object node of the software application, wherein the second collaboration service node is corresponding to the second software object node; determining a collaboration service provided by the first collaboration service node based on a type of the corresponding first software object node; and executing the collaboration service for the first software object node at the computer system, wherein the collaboration service is invoked by the software application executed in the computer system via the API provided for the software object, and wherein the execution of the collaboration service changes a collaboration status of the first software object node.