Patent ID: 7587504

Claim:
A computer-implemented method executing on hardware for storing, accessing and interchanging voluminous confidential documents for review by a plurality of parties and for notifying selected ones of a plurality of receiving computers generally operated by unrelated business organizations of receipt by a predetermined host server of such electronic documents from a sender computer for review, wherein the documents are reviewable by each respective receiving computer over a global communications network, the sender computer and the receiving computers each being registered in the host server, the method comprising the steps of: selecting one or more of the plurality of receiver computers to which selected documents are to be reviewed over the global communications network are addressed; storing the respective documents in a first database that is local relative to the sender computer; replicating the documents stored in the first database in a second database that is local relative to the predetermined server; issuing a respective notification message from the predetermined server to the selected receiver computers, each respective notification message indicating replicated documents available in the second database for their respective retrieval over the global communications network; and retrieving the replicated documents in the second database by the selected receiver computers over the global communications network upon a respective user of the selected receiver computers issuing a respective download command signal to the predetermined server; wherein the replicating step comprises replicating at predetermined time intervals documents stored in the first database into the second database.