Appeal 2007-0437
Application 09/982,224
path taken by the Appellants. This specific teaching of heartbeat commands
and messages in Caronni in a collaboration environment only emphasizes
the need for regular communications in the collaboration environment in
Brown.
Contrary to Appellants’ views expressed in the Brief and Rely Brief,
Brown does operate for simultaneous multi-user editing of a master copy of
a document available over a network from a file server as the Examiner has
made reference to at the bottom of column 1 of this reference. That Brown
may also teach the ability of the system to have collocated or otherwise
duplicate copies of the master document within each collaboration terminal
is not excluded by the subject matter of the representative independent claim
1 on appeal. The Examiner’s reference to the first paragraph of the
Summary of the Invention in Brown at the bottom of column 2 is very
telling since it emphasizes the need to synchronize or otherwise maintain
heartbeat type commands regularly transmitted between the collaborator
terminals. It also teaches the need for a reconciliation process among the
local copies of a given document copied from a shared server. The
synchronization and common timing arrangements are also emphasized in
the Summary of The Invention beginning at column 17 of Brown.
For its part, we also agree with the Examiner’s view that it would
have been obvious to have combined the teachings of Kumar with those of
Brown and Caronni. Initially, to the extent that Brown appears to be limited
in its teachings to the modification of documents, it appears very clear to us
that Kumar teaches a real-time collaboration environment synchronous
among collaborators. The Examiner’s reference to the teachings at columns
3 and 4 of this reference clearly makes reference to shared work spaces that
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