Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a relay server, a method of controlling the same, a communication system, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, remote maintenance services by audio and moving image communication and remote operation have been proposed for an image processing apparatus such as a multifunction peripheral (MFP). In a remote maintenance service, it is possible to solve an error at a time of an occurrence of an error in the multifunction peripheral by an operator of a call-center performing a remote operation for a multifunction peripheral or by an operator of a call-center directly conveying an error solving method to a user by audio and moving image communication. By this, a shortening of the time necessary to solve an error is possible without it being necessary for a worker to go to a site for maintenance.
In this kind of remote maintenance service, it is effective to realize a connection to an operator PC of the call-center using a communication means of the multifunction peripheral without the user using an apparatus other than the multifunction peripheral such as a telephone device or a PC. Regarding this point, in an office in which a multifunction peripheral exists, because a firewall (FW) is generally installed, it is necessary to establish a session via the FW between the multifunction peripheral (information terminal) and the operator PC of the call-center (information terminal). Normally, a connection by HTTP to an Internet side from the information terminal inside the FW is permitted while a connection from the Internet side to the information terminal inside the FW is restricted. For this reason, by the two information terminals respectively establishing connections with a session management server (relay server) to which they can connect as HTTP clients, a session between the information terminals can be established via the relay server.
In this kind of system, the establishment of the session between the multifunction peripheral and the operator PC of the call-center is performed by the following procedure, for example. When the multifunction peripheral connects to the relay server, the relay server issues a “query code” to the multifunction peripheral as an identifier for communication with the multifunction peripheral. The user of the multifunction peripheral conveys the issued query code by a telephone call or the like to the operator of the call-center. The operator of the call-center inputs the query code elicited from the user of the multifunction peripheral to a system. By this, the session between the multifunction peripheral and the relay server is established and the remote maintenance service is started.
In the remote maintenance service, there is a case in which the multifunction peripheral restarts by a remote operation or instruction from the call-center side according to maintenance details or trouble details. For example, a restart of the multifunction peripheral is performed in a case where a setting change that becomes valid after a restart is performed or in a case where a malfunction occurs in the device. At a time of a restart of the multifunction peripheral, the remote maintenance of the multifunction peripheral cannot be performed because the session between the multifunction peripheral and the relay server is disconnected. However, it may be necessary for the remote maintenance to be continued after a restart of the multifunction peripheral in order to perform a verification of a setting after a change or to perform a continuation of maintenance work. A technique for automatically connecting at a time of a restart of the multifunction peripheral to a relay server based on information stored prior to a restart is proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2015-037259 as a technique for continuing a remote maintenance. This makes it unnecessary for a user to once again perform an operation for connecting to the relay server from the multifunction peripheral.
By virtue of the foregoing technique, when a multifunction peripheral during a continuation of a remote maintenance (maintenance work by a remote support) restarts, effort of a user of the multifunction peripheral can be reduced because the multifunction peripheral automatically reconnects to the relay server. Meanwhile, there is a possibility that effort of an operator of a call-center cannot be reduced. This is because, in many cases, a new identifier is issued to the multifunction peripheral from the relay server as an identifier (query code) for communication when reconnecting to the relay server. In this case, it is not possible to establish a session between the multifunction peripheral and the operator PC via the relay server to resume the remote maintenance, without the operator of the call-center again eliciting the identifier from the user of the multifunction peripheral and inputting it to the system.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds