Hewlett-Packard Company

Tammy A Heiserman

Michael A Kingdom

Scott J Warren

Aland B Adams

Mark H Notess

Graded restricted access to a System Administration Manager program is provided by equipping that System Administration Manager program with the ability to interpret certain classes of configuration files when it is started by a user desiring to obtain graded restricted access. One class of files identifies the various activities that the System Administration Manager program is to perform, graded restricted access or not. This class of files identifies activity names, icons and information about what to call or execute to perform the activity once it has been selected for running, and may collect activities into hierarchial groups. Another class of files associates selected users with selected activities. If the user running the System Administration Manager program is one who has activities associated with his user id, a menu screen for proceeding with those activities (and only those activities) is presented to the user. A menu of operations is also used for assisting the super user in establishing graded restricted access to the System Administration Manager program for the non super users selected to have it. Various security safeguards are incorporated into the System Administration Manager to prevent a user from surreptitiously promoting himself to super user.

System administration module for an operating system affords graded

An Object-Action Manager shields an applications developer from multiple display technologies and development tools and assists the developer in applications user interface creation. The manager includes a parser, an object-list builder, dialog-box builder, a library of access functions and a display handler. The object-list builder and dialog-box builder are used to build user interface screen definitions according to predetermined parameters. The parser reads a developer-defined description file and builds data structures. The object-list builder and dialog-box builder use the data structures to customize the user interface screens for the developer. The library contains functions used during operation of the user interface. The display handler manages interaction between the end-user and the developed application.

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Ft. Collins, CO, United States of America

Tammy A Heiserman