A system and method for incorporating social networking maps in collaboration tools is presented. A user creates rules that are based upon the user's relationship with other users and provides the rules to a network server. The network server uses these rules when the network server receives a relational request from the collaboration tool in order to filter a hierarchal social networking map. The hierarchal social networking map is centrally located such that different collaboration types may utilize the hierarchal social networking map. After filtering the hierarchal social networking map, the network server sends a list of user identifiers to the collaboration tool, which allows the user to collaborate with recipient users corresponding to the list of user identifiers, which are users that share a particular relationship with the user.