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Yes, usually shaping or policing applies to aggregate flows.
An exception is microflow policing, available on 6500. With that you can police individual flows.
In an example cases like you describe, where multiple flow aggregate bandwidth demand exceed available bandwidth, individual flows will compete for the bandwidth, and yes, that often would be considered "best effort".
Not withstanding the above, instead of worrying about policing individual users to some set amount of bandwidth, you might instead consider managing possible congestion by either allowing proportional sharing (a fair-queue approach) or by some kind of different service treatment based on the kind of traffic (e.g. real-time and/or interactive traffic gets priority to bandwidth over bulk data transfers).
