Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 6. Authentication and Security

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Configuring authentication

• Working with users, groups, and zones

• Configuring security

• Implementing permissions

• Implementing the ACEGI Spring security framework and services

This chapter discusses the authentication and security functionality built into Alfresco for user and group management, user authentication, permissions, and access control. In addition, this chapter provides instructions on how you can customize Alfresco for your own user base and needs using configurable modules for LDAP, NTLM, Kerberos, and other commonly used authentication protocols.

ALFRESCO AUTHENTICATION

The first time you access a vanilla Alfresco installation through the Alfresco Explorer Web client, Alfresco identifies you as a guest user. You can identify yourself as another user by clicking the Login link and entering a new user name and password in the Login window. If you log in with the credentials of a user with administrator privileges (Alfresco uses admin as the default user name and password), you can use the Administration Console to create additional users and assign them passwords.

In this out-of-the-box setup, you can manage the user base and their passwords manually from within Alfresco, and unauthenticated users still have limited access as the guest user.

From here, there are a number of common customizations you might want to make to scale up to the needs of a larger enterprise. For example, you might want to:

• Disable unauthenticated ...