Patent Document ID: 8462368
Application ID: 11378955

Base Claim:
1. A method for collecting and displaying information about printing device related objects on a network, comprising: providing a user with a graphic user interface of a main window of a device management application comprising a left pane tree and a central view pane; the user selecting in the left pane tree at least one topic of interest from at least one category of interest from a list of topics of interest which are hierarchically arranged by categories of interest, which left pane tree displays the list of topics of interest and the categories of interest, and which left pane tree does not display printing device related objects, wherein the list of topics provides a central point user interface comprising at least one root category of topics comprising the group consisting of device management, account management, queue management, queue user management, and combinations thereof to enable the user's selection from multiple levels of printing device related objects with circular associations to each other, which printing device related objects comprising traditional printing devices and non-traditional printing device related objects, which non-traditional printing device related objects comprise the group consisting of users, devices, alerts, hosts, queues, jobs, accounts, balances, and combinations thereof; the user specifying displaying in the central view pane of object property information associated with the selected at least one topic of interest about the printing device related objects; and causing displaying in the central view pane of object property information associated with the selected at least one topic of interest about the printing device related objects, while the left pane tree does not display printing device related objects wherein a list of devices can be displayed in the central view pane, and wherein displaying of the list of devices comprises: optionally expanding a Device Management category in order to select a List View topic of interest within the Device Management category; selecting the List View topic of interest within the Device Management category; and causing the list of devices to be displayed in the central view pane using a default object locator ALL, which locates all objects without any filtering, and the list of devices is never displayed in the left pane tree.

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Claim 8:
8. The method of claim 1 , further comprising a GUI to define a new topic action, comprising: selecting a target topic of interest; specifying a criterion for filtering objects in the target topic of interest for a dynamic locator; and specifying a name associated with the new topic action.