A communication system with enhanced collaboration functionality. During operations of the new communication system, users (e.g., online meeting, conference, call, or presentation attendees or participants operating a client device in communication via a communications network) join a collaboration session via their preferred collaboration application. One of the attendees wants to get their document or other content seen, so they share their screen and start to present their content. With the new communication system, an attendee chooses to initiate a collaboration option (e.g., clicking a button in a user interface such as “Create a conference call” button), while identifying or highlighting a subset or portion of the presented content as relevant to the new collaboration event. Attendees are added to an ad hoc conference meeting (or other new or spawned collaboration event), and the content that is originally asserted as the topic of conversation is displayed in the conferencing apparatus.