7. A system according to claim 1 , wherein the security credentials from the user comprise an employee level; and the security attributes from each secure data source comprise a Visibility attribute and at least one Category attribute; and each security attribute is categorized as either a GRANT or DENY tag.
1. A method, comprising: authenticating a user to a secure federated search environment; obtaining individual security attributes used by each of a plurality of secure data sources to determine whether to allow the user access, wherein each secure data source has its own identity management system; obtaining security credentials, a user ID, and a password from the user; translating the user ID and password into user identities for each of the identity management systems; filtering the security credentials of the user with the security attributes for each identity management system to create sets of security values corresponding to the security attributes for each identity management system; subscribing the user to at least one of a plurality of secure data source templates, the plurality of secure data sources templates defining the location of a repository and a set of instructions on how to crawl the repository; automatically launching a crawl of the at least one secure data source in response to the subscribing, wherein each secure data source crawled is indexed and has a portion stored locally by the federated search environment; receiving a query from the user; appending, to the query, the user identities and security values required by the identity management systems for each of the plurality of secure data sources, wherein the query has the user identities and security values embedded in the query; propagating the appended query to the plurality of secure data sources using the embedded user identities and security values to access the plurality of secure data sources; and consolidating query results received from the plurality of secure data sources, removing at least one duplicate result from the query results, and displaying the consolidated query results to the user in response to the query.