Abstract: A relationship management system stores multiple versions of contact information for a particular contact by storing the contact information that is available to all of the users of system that know a particular contact in a firm collection and by storing information about the particular contact that is available to a limited number of users that know the particular contact in one or more user collections. When changes are made to the user collection for a particular contact, the system detects the change, and based upon a number of administrative rules determines whether the change should be contributed to the firm collection. The system may automatically make the corresponding changes to each of the contact files within the firm collection or may recommend to the user whether the change should be promoted, allowing the users to accept or reject the recommendation.

Abstract: A relationship management system uses a database to store contact information related to a number of contacts and to store a number of folders, each of which reference one or more of the contacts within the database. The relationship management system also stores a set of contact-user pairs defining known relationships between users of the relationship management system and the contacts stored in the database. For each contact-user pair, an opt-in field indicating if the contact-user relationship is to be available for use in determining which users know a specified user is stored. If the opt-in flag is set, information pertaining to the nature of the relationship between the user and the contact, such as a relationship description, an indication of the type or strength of the relationship, etc. is also stored. At any desired time, a user may implement a user-contact reference routine to determine which users know a specified contact.

Abstract: A relationship management system stores multiple versions of contact information for a particular contact by storing the contact information that is available to all of the users of system that know a particular contact in a firm collection and by storing information about the particular contact that is available to a limited number of users that know the particular contact in one or more user collections. When changes are made to the firm collection for a particular contact, which can occur automatically when any user changes the contact file for that contact within his or her user collection, the change is reflected back to each of the users a having contact file for that contact within their user collection. The same change may be automatically made to each of the contact files within the user collections or may be reported to the users and allow the users to accept or reject the same change to the user collections owned by those users.

Abstract: An associative text search and retrieval system uses one or more front end processors to interacting with a network having one or more user terminals connected thereto to allow a user to provide information to the system and receive information from the system. The system also includes storage for a plurality of text documents, and at least one processor, coupled to the front end processors and the document storage. The processor(s) search the text documents according to a search request provided by the user and provide to the front end processor a predetermined number of retrieved documents containing at least one term of the search request. The retrieved documents have higher ranks than documents not provided to the front end processor. The ranks are calculated using a formula that varies according to the square of the frequency in each of the text documents of each of the search terms.

Abstract: A printer control apparatus includes a modem for receiving text data in the EBCDIC protocol and generic printer control codes from a host data base and a converter for converting the received information to drive a non-standard printer. A preprogrammed EPROM in cooperation with a CPU, converts the EBCDIC protocol language to the ASCII language. An EEPROM is remotely programmed to store printer control codes which are peculiar to the specific printer being supported.