In a distributed system comprising a document server and a plurality of clients which are connected to the document server via a network, each of the plurality of clients transmits, to the document server, an original transaction with information indicative of at least one client which uses a document. The document server receives the original transaction, processes the original transaction as a global document generation transaction to produce a document object, transmits, to the at least one client, the global transaction as a local transaction. The at least one client receives the local transaction and means for performing the local transaction to produce a virtual document object corresponding to the document object.