Patent ID: 7614060

Claim:
On a computing system, a method of unifying presence comprising: initializing an instance of one or more presence applications on a computer, each presence application instance including an application presence store that is in communication with an application abstraction layer at the computer, the application abstraction layer including a system presence store; each presence application instance generating application presence data; storing the generated application presence data for each presence application instance in the application presence store included with the presence application instance that generated the application presence data; generating system presence data; storing the generated system presence data in the system presence store; and publishing, to one or more application presence stores and through the application abstraction layer, both the generated system presence data stored in the system presence store and the application presence data stored in each application presence store; wherein the application presence data includes presence information describing the availability of each corresponding instance of the one or more presence applications initialized on the computer; wherein the system presence data includes presence information describing the availability of the computer that initialized the instance of the one or more presence applications; and wherein the application abstraction layer comprises a common interface for each presence application instance to access both the generated system presence data and the generated application presence data.