Patent ID: 8799785

Claim:
A method for scoping awareness to a collaborative task, the method comprising: establishing different collaborative contexts in a collaborative computing system, each of the collaborative contexts comprising a subset of users in the collaborative computing system and an arrangement of tasks to be performed amongst the subset of users; setting different availability messages for each of the different collaborative contexts, one of the different availability messages defines a first level of availability, and another of the different availability messages defines a second level of availability, the first level of availability being higher than the second level of availability; determining whether a user is assigned to multiple, different subsets of users and if so, identifying, based upon the different availability messages, a highest availability level online status assigned to one of the multiple, different subsets of users to which the user is determined to have been assigned; and, publishing the identified highest availability level online status for the user amongst the users to others of the users if it is determined that the user is assigned to multiple, different subsets of users, but otherwise, publishing an online status for the user amongst the users to others of the users for the user determined not to be assigned to multiple, different subsets of users, the online status varying for each of the other users depending upon a membership of each other of the users in a particular one of the collaborative contexts.