Alfresco membership and security model

A content management system requires a membership system for its users to access content, setup user preferences, and to allow its users to receive notifications and alerts. Members of the system can collaborate with other members by selectively sharing documents, and sharing ideas via discussion forums. Members can control and follow the business process through a workflow.

Traditional membership models address basic authentication (who can access) and authorization (what they can do). Alfresco extends this model by providing capabilities to manage groups and subgroups of members, member attributes, and member workspace, and provides a set of administrative tools to configure and control the membership.

Users and groups

Users are individual members, whereas groups are logical categorizations of users.

In Alfresco, a user is identified by a unique user ID, also known as login ID. The administrator is like a super user of the system. Alfresco identifies...