Patent ID: 7359965

Claim:
In a network-based system having a monitoring system and a plurality of image-handling devices communicatively coupled via a network, the monitoring system being communicatively coupled to first and second databases, a method of determining if an image-handling device is supported by the monitoring system, comprising: (a) querying the image-handling device to obtain an enterprise object identifier of the image-handling device; (b) determining if the image-handling device is supported by the monitoring system using the obtained enterprise object identifier and information stored in said second database; (c) obtaining a manufacturer of the image-handling device based on the obtained enterprise object identifier if the image-handling device is supported by the monitoring system (d) determining if the manufacturer of the image-handling device is supported by the monitoring system using information stored in said second database; obtaining a unique identifier from the image-handling device if the manufacturer is supported by the monitoring system; obtaining a MAC address of the image-handling device if the manufacturer is not supported by the monitoring system; and assigning a random number to the unique identifier if the MAC address cannot be obtained from the image-handling device.