About security modes

In addition to managing users and groups locally, entirely within a single project, you can also get pre-defined users and groups from other IWS projects or from an LDAP-compliant domain server.

IWS supports four security modes:
Local Only
This is the standard mode for most projects: users and groups are created in the development application, and they apply only to the project for which they're created.
Distributed – Server
This is similar to Local Only, except that the project's security system configuration is also made available to other IWS projects (that are set to Distributed – Client) on the same network. Furthermore, if the project loses its security system configuration for some reason, then it can reimport the configuration from one of its client projects.
Distributed – Client
When this mode is selected, the project gets its entire security system configuration from another IWS project (that is set to Distributed – Server) on the same network. The project caches this configuration and can continue to run even if it loses communication with the server project.
Domain (LDAP)
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a recognized standard for managing users and groups across many different applications on a network. When this mode is selected, the project gets its users and groups from an LDAP-compliant domain server, such as Microsoft Active Directory for Windows or OpenLDAP for Linux. However, only the user names, passwords, and group memberships are taken from the domain; specific rights must still be configured within the project.