additional access from the user who originated the document the access to the document may be controlled by other global factors based on the status for example ready for review approved published or whatever the activation for access without restriction can in this situation be attributed to a document once it has reached the published stage in all other static access is denied since in one embodiment of the invention the authorization plug in acts at the client side all authorization access to a particular document happens in the same place the viewer plug in and the document viewer work in conjunction to authorize the user to view the document this means user controlled access in accordance with the present invention and for example password access to the document viewer are handled at the client side due to the fact that the data transmitted between the plug in and the server are merely u201c an authorization request u201d or u201c an acknowledgement u201d security issues are improved it is not necessary to send any additional information other than these two messages which also means that bulk data transfer is avoided it is only necessary for the authorization information to be protected and not the entire document during the transmission from plug in to a server and vice versa as it is only this that is transmitted embodiments of the invention may take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment an entirely software embodiment or an embodiment containing both hardware and software elements in one embodiment the invention is implemented as a computer program product accessible from a computer usable or computer readable medium providing program code for use by or in connection with a.