A web site that does not recognise the visitor is limited in giving generic information or running public applications.  To allow visitors to login with a password and perform enquiry or transaction securely is a vital function to a commercial web site.  As a business oriented web tool, BEE is built in with user authentication and is very simple to use.

BEE authenticate a visitor (or user) based on a username and a password.  The username can be in a simple string format (e.g. "johnlee" or "maryjones"), or in a "realm" format (e.g. "joe@marketing" or "may@sydney").  The concept of "realm" not only help to preserve name space for different user groups, but also allow authentication tables to locate in different database even on different servers.

The BEE Hosting Administrator can specify for each "realm" where the authentication table is (server, database and table name), what database type it is, how to access it (field mapping and authentication keys for the table), and how the password is encrypted.

BEE also support multiple access levels.  Typically, there are five levels:

n        Public: not logged in

n        Affiliate: authenticated at "friendly" site

n        Member: logged in

n        VIP: logged in with privilege

n        Owner: logged in as the site owner

n        Admin: administrator login