Patent ID: 7340510

Claim:
In an information services network having channels, each channel including a plurality of content items, a management server and a group of content servers, at least one channel including items to be served from at least one content server in the group of content servers, where channel items vary over time, and items are replicated from origin servers to the content servers that serve the channel, a method of reporting replication status from the group of content servers in a channel comprising: maintaining a channel description of content via a sequence of change events, each event indicative of action for a particular file and each event having an associated incrementing event number such that each successive event has an increasing event number; identifying, upon completion of a particular change event, the event number corresponding to the event as completed, the change events further comprising ordering categories, each of the change events corresponding to one of a plurality of ordering categories, the ordering categories indicative of an alternate ordering criteria; reporting, for each of a plurality of content servers in the channel, an indication of event completion via a threshold event number, the threshold number being a progression threshold corresponding to a point of progression in the incrementing event numbers, the channel description maintained as status information in the content servers, the status information including the progression threshold within each of the ordering categories, wherein the replication status report omits transmitting cumulative, file specific information deterministic from the progression threshold; and aggregating reports from the plurality of content servers to obtain a global status report.