Patent ID: 7814051

Claim:
A system for managing watcher information in a distributed server environment, the system comprising: a watcher information database stored on a physical storage device, wherein said database is configured to store a plurality of records, each of said records is populated by a watcher identifier identifying a watcher, a presentity identifier identifying a corresponding presentity which is an entity to which the identified watcher is subscribed to receive presence information, a list of unique identifiers of a plurality of subscriptions of the watcher for the presence information of the corresponding presentity, a watcher state field indicating a current state of said watcher for each identified subscription, and an event field indicating a most recent event that last caused a state of said watcher to change for each identified subscription, each of said records represents a different pair of the watcher and the presentity, and each of said records maintains a single state for one or more subscriptions by the watcher to receive the presence information regarding the corresponding presentity; and a plurality of presence servers, wherein each of said presence servers is configured to modify any of said records to reflect the current state of the watcher for any subscription indicated in a corresponding record.