Preventing Conflicts of Interests Between Two or More Groups Using Applications
AssigneeNextLabs, Inc.
InventorKeng Lim
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
To prevent conflicts of interest, an information management system is used to make sure two or more groups are kept apart so that information does not circulate freely between these groups. The system has policies to implement an “ethical wall” to separate users or groups of users. The user or groups of user may be organized in any arbitrary way, and may be in the same organization or different organizations. The two groups (or two or more users) will not be able to access information belonging to the other, and users in one group may not be able to pass information to the other group. The system may manage access to documents, e-mail, files, and other forms of information.
Claims5
A method of managing information comprising:
- providing an organization comprising a first group and a second group, wherein the organization has an information management system comprising a policy server comprising one or more rules to manage information of the organization;
- within the first group of the organization, providing a first user and a first application program managed by the information management system;
- when the first user uses the first application program to connect to a second user, seeking approval from the policy server;
- if approved, permitting the first user to use the first application program to connect to the second user;
- and
- if not approved, blocking the first user from using the first application program to connect to the second user.
A method of managing information comprising:
- providing an organization comprising a first group and a second group, wherein the organization has an information management system comprising a policy server comprising one or more rules to manage information of the organization;
- within the first group of the organization, providing a first user and a first application program managed by the information management system;
- when the first user uses the first application program to connect to a second user to transfer a first component of information, seeking approval from the policy server, wherein the seeking approval from the policy server comprises:
- determining a first component of information corresponds to an identifier designating the first component of information as confidential includes accessing a metadata information associated with the first component of information;
- extracting at least one attribute associated with the first component of information and the identifier, wherein the at least one attribute is used to determine whether to allow access to the first component of information to a user of the information management system, wherein the identifier is an uniform resource identifier associated with the first component of information;
- and
- based on the at least one attribute, evaluating using the policy server whether to allow access to the first component of information includes determining whether the first user's use of the first application program to connect to the second user is during a specific time period of the organization.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.