Patent ID: 8612439

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for collaboratively searching for stored documents related to an organization, the method comprising: creating a collaborative document, wherein multiple users can add search criteria to the collaborative document; posting the collaborative document to a collaborative shared logical location accessible by multiple users; receiving at least a first search criterion from a first user computer and adding and saving the first search criterion to the collaborative document; receiving at least a second search criterion from a second user computer and adding and saving the second search criterion to the same collaborative document, wherein the first and second user computers are geographically separated; generating a third search criterion based on dynamic changes made to at least one of the first search criterion and the second search criterion or based on heuristics-type information from at least one of the first search criterion and the second search criterion; and performing a search of the stored documents based on the collaborative document containing the first, second, and third search criteria to create one or more search results that identify stored documents, wherein the search of the stored documents includes a search of both online and offline documents, wherein some or all of the offline documents contain data that is no longer available on a local area network of the organization, wherein online documents include secondary copies of data stored at non-public locations on two or more cloud storage sites, wherein the two or more cloud storage sites are operated by different vendors, and wherein the search of the stored documents in the two or more cloud storage sites is performed by receiving and executing generic or vendor-agnostic file system calls.