Patent ID: 7509378

Claim:
A computer system for message ordering in a message oriented network, independently of any conversation processing, comprising: a sender or a plurality of senders, that sends messages as a plurality of groups of messages, wherein each message within a particular group are to be processed in a particular order; a plurality of receivers, that receive the messages; and, wherein, for each group of messages that are to be processed in the particular order, each of said senders associate the messages in that group with both a sequence group identifier for that group, and a sequence number for that message; and wherein each of the receivers identifies messages having common sequence group identifiers, and then cooperates with other receivers to process those messages in the particular order, including confirming, prior to processing a message received in a group and having a particular sequence group identifier and sequence number combination, that a previous receiver has already one of received or processed a message having the same sequence group identifier and the preceding sequence number.