1. A method of controlling access using centrally managed rules comprising: providing rules, wherein the rules are stored in a rules database maintained by a central rule server, the rules of the rules database comprises a conditional statement having a policy abstraction and a corresponding action that will be performed when the conditional statement is satisfied, and each policy abstraction has a corresponding definition statement stored in a definition statement database, different than the rules database; transferring a first subset of rules stored in the rules database to a client system, wherein the first subset of rules transferred to and stored on the client system contains at least one expression used by the client system to perform access control for documents accessed by the client system, even when the client system is disconnected to a network to which the central rule server is coupled; and while the client system is disconnected from the network to which the central rule server is coupled, allowing the client system to access a document based upon an evaluation of a rule of the first subset of rules which is stored at the client system.