Patent ID: 7961667

Claim:
A method for ad-hoc group presence management, the method comprising: configuring a presence server in a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)/SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) environment to receive a group document regarding a group and entities belonging to the group and create a group presentity associated with the group, wherein the group document is in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) format; and providing the group document regarding the group and its entities to the presence server, the presence server using at least one XPATH statement contained in a header of the group document to extract the entities belonging to the group to create the group presentity; wherein the configuring step comprises configuring the presence server to send different notifications to different subscribers to the group presentity, each notification including presence information for different subsets of the entities, and comprises configuring the presence server to receive a policy information from a group management server which manages the group.