4. The system of claim 1 , further comprising: an external application, the external application being processed to request collection information regarding at least a portion of the persistent document collections from the content management application to enable at least one of the plurality of users to download the one or more of the documents that are represented by the collection information.
1. A system for creating and managing persistent document collections comprising: memory; a data store for storing one or more persistent document collections; and a browser-based content management application that receives user input from a client-side web browser, the content management application being processed to manage documents for a plurality of users, to create a persistent document collection grouping together a plurality of the documents upon user request from the client-side web browser and to assign an attribute to the persistent document collection that specifies any external applications with which the persistent document collection can share its documents, the persistent document collection enabling at least one of the plurality of users to access the plurality of documents as a group, and to store the one or more persistent document collections in the data store, in storage space allocated to the one or more persistent document collections, wherein the content management application is further processed to assign one or more attributes to the persistent document collection, wherein the one or more attributes include an amount of disk space measured in a multiple of bits or a multiple of bytes to allocate to the persistent document collection.