The present invention disclosed comprises a method for easily adding collaboration functionality to new and existing software. The invention allows seamless collaborative operations at the whole product level, but very importantly, comprises a method for dividing monolithic work products, such as, but not limited to, documents into physical and logical subsets of the work product. In another major aspect of the invention, there is a method that enables separate control of actions within the complete or subsets of the divided work product. These methods to divide normally monolithic work products and determine what actions can occur within these subsets of the work product enable a number of other processes that are additional aspects of the invention.