The Greenstone software comes equipped with an authentication system. Users can "Register" in the system, and can then access protected parts of the library, such as remote collection editing, online document editing (greenstone 3) and protected collections.

A special type of user called an "administrator" is able to manage users. Anyone can register as a user, but only administrators can assign groups to that user. Groups control which collections/activities a user is allowed access to.

For more information on security in Greenstone 3, refer to Security in Greenstone Collections

Greenstone's user database is controlled by Administration Pages in the library. Admin users (users with the 'administrator' group set) can list users, edit their details (including which groups they belong to) and delete or create new ones. In addition, in greenstone 3, anyone can register themselves as a new user (although an administrator needs to set their groups).

Authentication of users is done by requesting a user name and password.

The current list of predefined groups is as follows:

• administrator: Gives permission to access and change site configuration and user accounts.
• personal-collections-editor: Gives permission to create new personal collections
• <collection-name>-collection-editor: Gives permission to create and edit the "collection-name" collection, for example, reports-collection-editor.
• all-collections-editor: Gives permission to create new personal and global collections and edit all collections. Also gives permission to use the Collector (Greenstone 2).

In addition, any custom group name can be used.

When Greenstone is installed, there is one user called admin who belongs to both the administrator and all-collections-editor groups. The password for this user is set during the installation process (If you did not set a password during installation, the admin login will default to username = admin, password = admin).

For more details about user management, see the appropriate page for your Greenstone:

• Greenstone 3 User Management
• Greenstone 2 User Management

Collections can be made public or private. Additionally they can be password protected so that only users who belong to specified groups can access them. Or collections can be public with the exception of a few specified documents in that colleciton, which require a username and password to access.

See the Security in Greenstone Collections page for more details about this.

Once you have authenticated users, you can use features such as:

• User Comments - if this is enabled for a collection, logged in users can add comments to a document.
• Online Document Editing - In greenstone 3 you can enable web editing for documents. Here authenticated users (with collection editing privileges) can modify the metadata or text content of a document.

• The Formatting and Authentication demo collection uses authentication.