At a high level, the security model in Documentum is similar to that used in contemporary enterprise applications. There are resources (information, objects) that need to be secured, there are operations that can be performed on the resources, and there are users who wish to perform these operations. The security configuration defines what is allowed for various combinations of users, operations, and resources. At run time, a user attempts to perform an operation and the components of the Documentum architecture resolve rules for the specific user, operation, and resource combination to allow or disallow the attempted operation.
At a detailed level, security implementation is very specific to the Documentum architecture. This is the first chapter on Documentum security and introduces the concept of users and security aspects that are tied to users.
Security, in general, involves — two parts authentication and authorization. While authorization deals with what a user...