Patent ID: 7418475

Claim:
A conversation manager executing on an intermediate collaboration server for managing the flow of messages using different local business protocols in a collaboration system, comprising: a conversation initiation logic that initiates a conversation among a plurality of participants, wherein said conversation is a collective set of messages exchanged by the plurality of participants according to an extensible protocol, wherein the extensible protocol provides an ability for a sending participant to specify both a routing information and a business protocol to be used by the sending participant within the conversation, and wherein the routing information is specified by the sending participant in a header of the extensible protocol; a participation registration logic that registers said participants in said conversation; a conversation repository that stores conversation management data used to manage said conversation among said plurality of participants; a plurality of business protocol handlers, each of which are configured to recognize a different business protocol vocabulary chosen from the group of RosettaNet, XOCP, or other business protocols, and convert incoming messages from participants for routing by the conversation manager, and wherein any one of the business protocols is selected and used by a participant to send and receive messages according to the particular business protocol vocabulary and process flow that is used locally by that participant; a plurality of decoders that receive incoming messages from senders, identify protocol-specific headers in the incoming messages and assign the incoming messages to an appropriate business protocol handler; a plurality of encoders that send outgoing messages to recipients, including assigning the outgoing messages to an appropriate business protocol handler that matches the business protocol vocabulary of the recipients; and a transport configured to accept messages from the participants using any of a plurality of different business protocols, identify a business protocol being used, and invoke one or more of said plurality of decoders and encoders to communicate the messages between a first participant using a first business protocol vocabulary, and a plurality of other participants using different business protocol vocabularies, wherein the business protocol is identified by the sending participant according to a uniform resource locator (URL) which is selected and used by the sending participant to communicate with said conversation.