System and method for providing security in a communities framework

Systems and methods are disclosed for providing security for a communities framework in a collaborative computing environment. A community can be provided for maintaining user membership during collaboration. The community can contain various collaboration resources, community services and members having access to the resources and services. A first layer of security can be implemented via membership and functional capabilities. Members can be assigned to various membership capabilities and these membership capabilities can be mapped to functional capabilities in order to control access to the resources by the various members. A second layer of security can be implemented via entitlements and security policies applied to the content repository. Entitlements can be applied at a node level of a content repository. Each node can be evaluated when operations are requested for it.