A User-Centered Approach to Access Control in Collaborative Environments

摘要

Access models for collaborative environments tend to be rather complex. Ths leads to difficulties in the presentation and manipulation of access policies at the user-interface level. The problem becomes even more pronounced due to the high dynamics of collaborative work settings. This paper presents a user-centered approach, the central concept of which are access statements. These statements are based ont eh results of a field study and represent permissions or denials for arbitrary scopes, encompassing-among other factors - users, documents, roles and time-intervals. We describe how this approach has been implemented within a commerical groupware system and the results of an evaluation using the thinking aloud method.