Patent ID: 6981222

Claim:
A system for passing communications between a manufacturer and a manufacturer's customer, the system comprising: a customer interface for passing communications to and from a customer; an application server in communication with said customer interface comprising an application level protocol for receiving customer communications from the customer interface and, in response to said customer communication, generating a message; a client interface in communication with said application server for passing messages to and from said application server; a remote back-office database server coupled to said client interface, the back-office database server providing access to data which is desired by the customer wherein the data is in the form of representations of a plurality of business documents; means for relating the plurality of business documents according to a previously established progression, the previously established progression defining the relationships between different types of business documents as they are encountered in a typical business environment and defining allowed navigation paths between the plurality of business documents; means for displaying the previously established progression as a hierarchical tree structure of representations of business documents, the tree structure having at least one branch, wherein: the tree structure has a plurality of levels in a hierarchy, each level being in a dominant-subordinate relationship with each adjacent level, at least two levels in the same branch comprise at least one document type node and at least one document instance node, the document type nodes in at least two different levels in the same tree branch identify different types of business documents, each document instance node is: (a) immediately subordinate to a document type node, (b) associated with a representation of the same type of business document as a document instance node in the same level of the same branch, and (c) associated with a representation of a business document that is related to a representation of a business document associated with a document instance node in another level in the same branch; means for selecting a particular document instance node; and means for displaying information contained in the representation of a business document associated with a selected document instance node.