The Enterprise Manager displays all available classes in its Document Class and Other Classes nodes. The administrator can define any number of new subclasses of most of these classes and can edit the access rights of any class.
When you use the Enterprise Manager to display the properties of a document class, you see three security-related tabs:
The Content Engine provides the Document Class which you can modify and use as the start of your own hierarchy of document classes. For example, you could create this hierarchy of document classes:
Document Class (predefined, can be modified)
Tax Bills (subclass of Document Class)
Property Tax Bills (subclass of Tax Bills)
Estate Tax Bills (subclass of Tax Bills)
Each document class receives its default security from its document class parent. Subsequent updates to a parent class propagate to the child classes.
The Default Instance Security collection of permissions on a document class provides the initial security for a new document based on that class. Similarly with folders and every other class that allows you to create "instances" of it. This initial security is not treated as Inherited and is therefore editable. Modifying a class does not affect the security of existing objects based on that class.
See also Class definition security levels.