Patent 7415276 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on August, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A scheme and a device for managing a user state and a plurality of terminal states on a presence server, and for automatically selecting an optimum terminal by using both the user state and the terminal states. Priority degrees which depend on the terminal states are set, then selecting a terminal whose priority degree is the highest of the plurality of terminals. In association therewith, a priority rank which is set depending on the user state is also taken into consideration, thereby selecting a final optimum terminal. The present scheme makes it possible to automatically perform a fine-grained selection of the optimum terminal in which both the terminal states and the user state are taken into consideration.