A Web-based management system operating method automates collection and
analysis of information from a plurality of networked devices, as well as
creation of metrics, and independently assembles and displays data
related to the networked device information on a distributed network. The
networked devices may include one or more copiers, printers, facsimile
machines and multifunction devices. Internal and external data is
gathered from the networked devices. At least one of graphical, textual,
statistical, metrics and status data is generated using a network
database concurrently. This data is assembled and presented to a user on
demand as one or more Web pages. The method uses template-driven
mechanisms, or Web objects, that significantly simplify the creation,
dynamic modification and persistence, as well as enforcement of
concurrency, contention, and atomicity rules between, individual Web
objects that compose the Web pages through the use of objects, concurrent
state machines, events and actions within states. A Portion of the Web
page can be separately created, e.g., manually or with a web page
authoring tool The Web objects are combined and populated dynamically
from the appropriate Web object states for the final display as a Web
page by a Web browser.