A system and method for role pen based messaging in a collaborative environment is presented. Online users utilize clients and a server to collaborate in a distributed presentation. One of the users is a presentation leader and sends presentation content to the server which distributes the presentation content to participating users. One of the users wishes to send a comment to a subset of the participating users. The user selects a role pen from a role pen stand whereby the role pen corresponds to a subset of the participating users. The user then generates a comment using his keyboard and/or mouse pointer, and the user's client sends the comment to recipient users' clients that correspond to the role pen. The recipient users' clients display the comment in the same window as the distributed presentation. Participating users that do not correspond to the role pen do not receive the comment.