Patent ID: 7844582

Claim:
A method for involving a human user in object management, comprising: enabling an administrator of an enterprise to define an enterprise wide user identity for the human user; obtaining a set of user identities of the human user associated with a set of filesystems; associating the enterprise wide user identity of the human user with the set of user identities of the human user, wherein each of the set of user identities of the human user is associated with one of the set of filesystems; before or after the associating step, extracting data and metadata associated with objects from the set of filesystems, wherein the objects include files and directories and extracting the metadata comprises: collecting raw metadata of the files and directories, filtering the raw metadata, synthesizing synthetic metadata from the filtered raw metadata, and generating content-based metadata wherein generating content-based metadata for a file comprises processing content of the file according to a type of the file to determine one or more content-specific entities within the file; storing the data and metadata in a metadata repository as records, each record linking a set of attributes to an object in one of the set of filesystems, wherein the set of attributes includes information identifying an owner of the object; locating a set of records for the human user within the metadata repository using one or more of the set of user identities of the human user, wherein the human user is an owner of each of the objects corresponding to each of the set of records; and generating a report specific to the human user based on the set of records for the human user, wherein the report includes information on adherence to enterprise policies only by the human user associated with the enterprise wide user identity in conjunction with each of the objects corresponding to each of the set of records for the human user and excluding other human users of the enterprise from the report.