Abstract: Techniques of federation of data during query time are disclosed herein. One example technique includes upon receiving an indication of interaction of a file by a user of a tenant, determining whether automatic replication of the file to a user shard corresponding to the user is permitted according to a company policy or a legal requirement, the user shard being in a second geographic region. The example technique can then include when automatic replication of the file is not permitted, storing the file in a tenant shard corresponding to the tenant in a network storage in the first geographic region and instead of replicating the file to the user shard in the second geographic region, creating, in the user shard in the second geographic region, a file reference that is a pointer to the file stored in the tenant shard in the network storage in the first geographic region.

Abstract: Techniques of federation of data during query time are disclosed herein. One example technique includes upon receiving an indication of interaction of a file by a user of a tenant, determining whether automatic replication of the file to a user shard corresponding to the user is permitted according to a company policy or a legal requirement, the user shard being in a second geographic region. The example technique can then include when automatic replication of the file is not permitted, storing the file in a tenant shard corresponding to the tenant in a network storage in the first geographic region and instead of replicating the file to the user shard in the second geographic region, creating, in the user shard in the second geographic region, a file reference that is a pointer to the file stored in the tenant shard in the network storage in the first geographic region.

Abstract: An API on a server system automatically gathers an instance of each multiple resources from different sources, storing each instance in the server system. Later, a call to the API is received from a querying application, the call comprising a search query comprising. In response, the API selects one or more of the plurality of resources as search results based on evaluating the criterion or criteria against the already-gathered instances of the resources as stored in the server system. The API returns a search response to the querying application, making the corresponding stored instances available to a consuming party In embodiments the API is “holistic” in nature, in that the search results may comprise different types of resource (e.g. file, email, task), from different types source (e.g. type of application they originate from), and/or related to the consuming part by different types of activity (e.g. used, modified shared, trending).