are well known in the art and are used to automate industrial tasks the network 104 may be a corporate computing network including possible access to the internet to which other computers and computing devices physically removed from the process 101 are connected in one embodiment the lans 102 104 conform to transmission control protocol internet protocol tcp ip and common object request broker architecture cobra industry standards in alternative embodiments the lans 102 104 may conform to other network standards including but not limited to the international standards organization 39 s open systems interconnection ibm 39 s sna u00ae novell 39 s netware u00ae and banyon vines u00ae the system 100 includes a server 108 that is connected by network signal lines to one or more clients 112 in an exemplary embodiment the server 108 includes a unix or windows nt based operating system the server 108 and clients 112 may be uniprocessor or multiprocessor machines and may otherwise be configured in a wide variety of ways to operate consistent with the teachings of the present invention the server 108 and clients 112 each include an addressable storage medium such as random access memory and may further include a nonvolatile storage medium such as a magnetic or an optical disk the system 100 also includes a storage medium 110 that is connected to the process control network 102 or corporate control network 104 in the exemplary embodiment the storage medium 110 may be configured as a database from which data can be both stored and retrieved the storage medium 110 is accessible by devices such as servers clients process controllers and the like connected to the.