Patent ID: 8280957

Claim:
A communications manager within a presence system maintaining presence information on a plurality of presentities and subscription information for a plurality of watchers of said presentities, said communications manager comprising: an event detector capable of detecting the occurrence of an event associated with a watcher of a presentity, the event not being associated with any of said presentities; a controller operable to automatically modify a status of a presence subscription of said watcher by subscribing or unsubscribing said watcher to receive presence information of said presentity in response to detection of said event, said presence system not maintaining said presence information of said presentity for said watcher while said watcher is unsubscribed to receive said presence information of said presentity; and a memory for storing watcher preferences including subscription authorization information to enable said controller to modify said status of said presence subscription of said watcher, said subscription authorization information including a user identifier and password of said watcher, a presence server address and presence filtering information specifying portions of said presence information of said presentity to be provided to said watcher.