The BEE authentication system is much more than a password lookup tool.  It support both plain text and one-way encrypted password, including Std-DES, Ext-DES, MD5 and Blowfish.  It can also mix plain text passwords with encrypted ones.  For example, you can have an encrypted admin password but clear text for all other passwords.

You can append an optional "realm" to qualify the user name.  For example, you can have username "john" being a customer, john@marketing being your own staff and probably john@boss being yourself.  Usernames and passwords of different realms can co-exist on a single user list or separated on different lists or even different servers or different database platforms.

For example, the "@customer" realm can be from your billing system and the "staff" realm from payroll.  You can define different access levels and use BEE Tags (e.g. <beeaccess allow="at least VIP"> ... </beeaccess>) to control the access.  All member records (except for foreign database) can be edited from the Admin site.

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