if the user does not have sufficient access rights access is denied in step 43 and control is passed back to step 40 if the contrary is the case the application is granted access to the requested resource advantageously this procedure does not require access to the computer b cf fig3 as the required information is locally stored on the users workstation this speeds up the granting of access to a requested resource and also increases the reliability of the system for example considering interruptions in the data transmission between computer a and computer b in a manufacturing environment the present invention is virtually immune from delays caused thereby due to the locality of the access information in accordance with an aspect of the invention each script file contains a list of named resources that can be accessed or cannot be accessed by the user resource qualifiers are employed to identify the resource class it would be possible to have two resources with the same name but a different meaning in one aspect resource qualifiers may be alphanumeric strings with a prefix u201c u201d e g action jser action unit plant unit etc in another aspect some or all of the qualifiers may correspond to file extensions if they indicate a file category in the former case the action qualifier is used for the predefined resources i e the resources already handled by the older user management system below are listed examples of actions and their corresponding script s in so setting forth the examples the following should be kept in mind a the action u201c tag setting u201d may be applied to a list of pant areas or graphic displays b the action u201c modify and save file u201d could be applied to all programming languages files but not.