Microsoft 365 Glossary

Communication Site

A Communication Site is generally used to communicate from a smaller group to a larger group. For this reason, Communication Sites are often used in Intranets.

Crawled Property

A Crawled Property is one of the basic units of the Search Schema. They are created automatically by the SharePoint Search Indexer (or Crawler) when it is discovering content that can be searched. The information stored in Crawled Properties is made available in queries by mapping them to Managed Properties.

Azure Information Protection (AIP)

A cloud solution that supports labeling of documents and emails to classify and protect information. Labeled items can be protected by encryption, marked with a watermark or restricted to specific actions or users and is bound to the item. This cloud based solution relies on Azure Rights Management Service (RMS) for enforcing restrictions.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. CDNs' store cached content on edge servers in point-of-presence (POP) locations that are close to end users, to minimize latency.

Farm

A set of on premises servers that hosts the SharePoint application, including SQL servers that host the SharePoint databases. A Farm can be single server or multi-tiered architecture containing multiple servers.

Citizen Developer

A user whose job definition does not include any development activities and/or without formal software development training, but who nevertheless creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.

Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS)

Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS) enables Federated Identity and Access Management by securely sharing digital identity and entitlements rights across security and enterprise boundaries. AD FS extends the ability to use single sign-on functionality that is available within a single security or enterprise boundary to Internet-facing applications to enable customers, partners, and suppliers a streamlined user experience while accessing the web-based applications of an organization.

Activity Explorer

Activity explorer provides a historical view of activities on your labeled content. The activity information is collected from the Microsoft 365 unified audit logs, transformed, and made available in the Activity explorer UI. Activity explorer reports on up to 30 days worth of data.

Adaptive Cards

Adaptive Cards are a platform-agnostic method of sharing and displaying blocks of information without the complexity of customizing CSS or HTML to render them. You author Adaptive Cards in JSON format, with integrations that cloud apps and services can openly exchange. When delivered to a specific host, such as Microsoft Teams, the JSON is transformed into native UI that automatically adapts to its host. Therefore, process designers can now offer consistent UI patterns whenever they need to display information as part of a business process/automation.

Adaptive Scopes (Retention)

Adaptive scopes as a new feature is currently in preview and subject to change. The alternative option is a static scope, which provides the same behavior before adaptive scopes were introduced and can be used if adaptive scopes don't meet your business requirements.

Administrative units

Administrative units restrict permissions in a role to any portion of your organization that you define. You could, for example, use administrative units to delegate the Helpdesk Administrator role to regional support specialists, so they can manage users only in the region that they support.

Always on VPN

Always On VPN provides a single, cohesive solution for remote access and supports domain-joined, nondomain-joined (workgroup), or Azure AD-joined devices, even personally owned devices.

Backup

Always a hot topic. There is no native traditional backup and restore capability within Microsoft 365. The link to the left shows Microsoft's stance in relation to backup of Exchange Online as an example. Third-party products are available, but are they worth it, and are they needed? The debate goes on.

App

An App is a term in SharePoint that means a packaged extension or customization that you can add to a site. An app can simply be a list that you add to a site to store information, or it can be a package that installs web parts that are available to use on pages, customizations that give you extra functionality within existing lists and libraries, or it could be an entire application that runs outside of SharePoint but has the ability to read and write back to your SharePoint site.

CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language)

An XML fragment used by SharePoint to define the internal structure of sites, lists, fields, views and content types, declaratively, also used to query data in SharePoint lists to selectively retrieve data.

App Protection Policies

App protection policies (APP) are rules that ensure an organization's data remains safe or contained in a managed app. A policy can be a rule that is enforced when the user attempts to access or move "corporate" data, or a set of actions that are prohibited or monitored when the user is inside the app. A managed app is an app that has app protection policies applied to it, and can be managed by Intune.

App Catalog

As a SharePoint or global admin in Microsoft 365, you can acquire solutions from the SharePoint Store or distribute custom apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. The first step in acquiring solutions is to have an App Catalog you can use to store and distribute solutions.

Bring your own device (BYOD)

As you develop your strategy to enable employees to work remotely on their own devices (BYOD), you need to make key decisions in the scenarios to enable BYOD and how to protect your corporate data. Fortunately, EMS offers all of the capabilities you need in a comprehensive set of solutions.

Azure AD Connect Cloud Sync

Azure AD Connect cloud sync is new offering from Microsoft designed to meet and accomplish your hybrid identity goals for synchronization of users, groups and contacts to Azure AD. It accomplishes this by using the Azure AD cloud provisioning agent instead of the Azure AD Connect application. However, it can be used alongside Azure AD Connect sync.

Azure AD Connect

Azure AD Connect is an on-premises Microsoft application that's designed to meet and accomplish your hybrid identity goals.

Conditional Access

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Conditional Access brings signals together, to make decisions, and enforce organizational policies. Conditional Access is at the heart of the new identity-driven control plane.

Access Reviews

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) access reviews enable organizations to efficiently manage group memberships, access to enterprise applications, and role assignments. User's access can be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure only the right people have continued access.

B2B

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) business-to-business (B2B) collaboration is a feature within External Identities that lets you invite guest users to collaborate with your organization.

Entitlement Management

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) entitlement management is an identity governance feature that enables organizations to manage identity and access lifecycle at scale, by automating access request workflows, access assignments, reviews, and expiration.

B2C

Azure Active Directory B2C provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Your customers use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to your applications and APIs.

Azure Active Directory (AAD)

Azure Active Directory is the Microsoft 365 source for all identity management, and much more. For example, Microsoft 365 Groups and applications permissions are stored in AAD.

Application Proxy

Azure Active Directory's Application Proxy provides secure remote access to on-premises web applications. After a single sign-on to Azure AD, users can access both cloud and on-premises applications through an external URL or an internal application portal.

Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktop is a desktop and app virtualization service that runs on the cloud. With Azure Virtual Desktop, you can set up a scalable and flexible environment.

Best Practices

Best practices for collaborating with Microsoft 365.

(BDS)

Business Data Services***

Calendar

Calendars in Exchange Online mailboxes are available for users. Shared, Resource, and Room mailbox calendars are also available.

Channels

Channels in Microsoft Teams are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, and disciplines! Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint.

Classic SharePoint

Classic SharePoint refers to the user interface (UI) that was available starting in SharePoint 2013 - what you might think of as the blue and white UI. Classic SharePoint uses master pages and page layouts for content structuring. These capabilities were built on the .NET framework.

Column Formatting

Column Formatting is a SharePoint feature that allows users to customize the display of fields in Document Libraries and Lists. Colors, icons, images and other elements are used to highlight content and improve the user experience. Links are used to make content actionable. Some columns types, like Date and Choice, include ready made design templates. All column types allow for advanced formatting using JSON code.

Enterprise Content Types

Content Types and Site Columns that are defined in the Content Type Hub, then published to all Site Collections in the tenant.

Content Types

Content types help make it easy to provide consistency across a site. You create or customize a content type with the characteristics that you want, such as a certain template, specific metadata, and so on.

Domains

Custom domains can be added into Microsoft 365. Your company might need multiple domain names for different purposes. For example, you might want to add a different spelling of your company name because customers are already using it and their communications have failed to reach you.

DKIM

DKIM is one of the trio of Authentication methods (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) that help prevent attackers from sending messages that look like they come from your domain.

Desktop Analytics

Desktop Analytics is a cloud-based service that integrates with Configuration Manager. The service provides insight and intelligence for you to make more informed decisions about the update readiness of your Windows clients. Desktop Analytics is deprecated and will be retired on November 30, 2022.

Development Operations (DevOps)

DevOps generally refers to both the automation of recurring processes and the improvement of those processes over time.

Direct Access

DirectAccess allows connectivity for remote users to organization network resources without the need for traditional Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections. With DirectAccess connections, remote client computers are always connected to your organization - there is no need for remote users to start and stop connections, as is required with VPN connections. In addition, your IT administrators can manage DirectAccess client computers whenever they are running and Internet connected.

Document Library

Document Libraries are a primary storage location in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. A Document Library is a special type of list where documents or other files are added as items, but no further file attachments can be added. Other files are added as separate entries in the library. By default, every file uploaded to a Document Library is created with a Content Type of Document.

DMARC

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) works with Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to authenticate mail senders and ensure that destination email systems trust messages sent from your domain.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is a set of intelligent business applications that helps you run your entire business and deliver greater results through predictive, AI-driven insights.

eDiscovery

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying and delivering electronic information that can be used as evidence in legal cases. You can use eDiscovery tools in Microsoft 365 to search for content in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and Yammer.

F3 licence

Empower your frontline workforce to achieve more. Equip frontline workers with powerful and intuitive tools that deliver a connected and secure experience. Transform business processes with customized apps and workflow automation to save time and money. Safeguard company assets with intelligent security that won't slow down frontline productivity.

F1 licence

Empower your frontline workforce with a secure, intuitive and connected experiences. Protect and secure your organization and empower your frontline to work in new and flexible ways. Equip your frontline workforce with powerful communication, collaboration and productivity experiences.

Exchange Online

Exchange Online is part of the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suite of products and provides email functionality to users.

Exchange Web Services (EWS)

Exchange Web Services (EWS) provides many operations that enable you to access information from the Exchange store. The articles in this section provide information about the overall structure of the requests, responses, and error response messages for EWS operations, as well as XML examples for each operation. They provide an overview of the message structures that are sent between the client and the server. You can use this information to debug message structures and to find information about what you can do in an EWS request.

Excel

From planning meals to comparing colleges, linked data types help achieve goals by bringing data on a variety of subjects right into Excel. Easily browse data, add to workbooks, and work with it the way you want.

Business Standard (Microsoft 365)

Get work done and increase efficiency with Microsoft 365. Collaborate in real time with teamwork tools that are always up to date. Plus, get professional email and online storage—all with built-in security to help keep your data safe.

Attack Simulator

If your organization has Microsoft 365 E5 or Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, which includes Threat Investigation and Response capabilities, you can use Attack simulation training in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to run realistic attack scenarios in your organization. These simulated attacks can help you identify and find vulnerable users before a real attack impacts your bottom line.

Compliance

If your organization needs to comply with legal or regulatory standards, start with the link to the left to learn about compliance in Microsoft 365.

Customization

Improving specific aspects of SharePoint functionality by changing settings through the end user interface. See also SharePoint Framework

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

In Microsoft 365, you implement data loss prevention by defining and applying DLP policies. With a DLP policy, you can identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive items across Microsoft 365 services, Office Applications, endpoint devices, non-Microsoft cloud apps, and on-premises file storage (including SharePoint).

Camel Case

In programming, Camel case is the practice of naming variables or controls by capitalizing all words except the first, giving the name a look like a camel's hump. Examples: iPad, intQuantity, myEmailAddress.

Billing

Learn how to buy and manage business subscriptions, perform license management tasks, and manage billing and payments for your business accounts with Microsoft.

Business Premium (Microsoft 365)

Microsoft 365 Business Premium brings together best-in-class Office apps and powerful cloud services with comprehensive security that helps protect your business against advanced cyber threats.

Defender

Microsoft 365 Defender is a unified pre- and post-breach enterprise defense suite that natively coordinates detection, prevention, investigation, and response across endpoints, identities, email, and applications to provide integrated protection against sophisticated attacks.

E3 licencing (Microsoft 365)

Microsoft 365 E3 combines best-in-class productivity apps with core security and compliance capabilities.

E5 licencing (Microsoft 365)

Microsoft 365 E5 combines best-in-class productivity apps with advanced security, compliance, voice, and analytical capabilities.

Access

Microsoft Access is a database program which is part of the Microsoft Office suite of products.

Bookings

Microsoft Bookings is for scheduling and managing appointments. Bookings includes a web-based booking calendar and integrates with Outlook to optimize your staff's calendar and give your customers flexibility to book a time that works best for them.

Customer Digital Experiences (CDX)

Microsoft Customer Digital Experiences (CDX), is a portfolio of immersed digital experiences to demonstrate Microsoft technology and product with hands-on interaction, orchestrated by Microsoft sellers, partners or marketers. There are three major types of experiences: demos, interactive guide, and Customer Immersion Experience.

Microsoft Dataverse for Teams

Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is a built-in, low-code data platform for Microsoft Teams, and provides relational data storage, rich data types, enterprise grade governance, and one-click solution deployment for Power App solutions built for, and within Microsoft Teams.

Defender for Cloud Apps

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (formerly known as Microsoft Cloud App Security) is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) that supports various deployment modes including log collection, API connectors, and reverse proxy. It provides rich visibility, control over data travel, and sophisticated analytics to identify and combat cyberthreats across all your Microsoft and third-party cloud services.

Defender for Endpoint

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an enterprise endpoint security platform designed to help enterprise networks prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats.

Defender for Identity

Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure Advanced Threat Protection, also known as Azure ATP) is a cloud-based security solution that leverages your on-premises Active Directory signals to identify, detect, and investigate advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious insider actions directed at your organization.

Defender for Office 365

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 safeguards your organization against malicious threats posed by email messages, links (URLs), and collaboration tools.

Endpoint Manager

Microsoft Endpoint Manager helps deliver the modern workplace and modern management to keep your data secure, in the cloud and on-premises. Endpoint Manager includes the services and tools you use to manage and monitor mobile devices, desktop computers, virtual machines, embedded devices, and servers.

Enterprise Mobility + Security

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) is an intelligent mobility management and security platform. It helps protect and secure your organization and empowers your employees to work in new and flexible ways.

Microsoft Dataverse

Microsoft Microsoft Dataverse is the premium data backbone that enables people to store their data in a scalable and secure environment dynamically. Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to look at data as a service spun up on-demand to meet ever-changing business needs.

Denial of Service Defence Strategy

Microsoft's strategy to defend against network-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is unique due to a large global footprint, allowing Microsoft to utilize strategies and techniques that are unavailable to most other organizations. Additionally, Microsoft contributes to and draws from collective knowledge aggregated by an extensive threat intelligence network, which includes Microsoft partners and the broader internet security community. This intelligence, along with information gathered from online services and Microsoft's global customer base, continuously improves Microsoft's DDoS defense system that protects all of Microsoft online services' assets.

E1 licencing (Office 365)

Office 365 E1 includes web-based apps like Excel and Outlook integrated with cloud services like OneDrive and Teams that enable productivity from anywhere.

E3 licencing (Office 365)

Office 365 E3 is a cloud-based suite of productivity apps and services with information protection and compliance capabilities included.

E5 licencing (Office 365)

Office 365 E5 is a cloud-based suite of productivity apps combined with advanced voice, analytics, security, and compliance services.

Family Edition (M365)

One convenient subscription for up to 6 people. Includes premium Office apps, up to 6TB of cloud storage - 1 TB per person - and advanced security for all your devices.

Communication Compliance

Protecting sensitive information and detecting and acting on workplace harassment incidents is an important part of compliance with internal policies and standards. Communication compliance in Microsoft 365 helps minimize these risks by helping you quickly detect, capture, and take remediation actions for email and Microsoft Teams communications. These include inappropriate communications containing profanity, threats, and harassment and communications that share sensitive information inside and outside of your organization.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Set of standards and processes to analyze, design, build, test and deploy a software solution. Modern ALM typically is an iterative process which allows for the incremental improvement and development and implementation of application features.

Advanced eDiscovery

The Advanced eDiscovery solution in Microsoft 365 builds on the existing Microsoft eDiscovery and analytics capabilities. Advanced eDiscovery provides an end-to-end workflow to preserve, collect, analyze, review, and export content that's responsive to your organization's internal and external investigations.

Content Query Web Part

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a web part available in Classic SharePoint that allows rolling up of content across lists and sub sites. The content returned is limited to only the site collection the web part is in. This web part has been replaced by the Highlighted Content web part in Modern SharePoint which gets around the site collection limitation.

Content Type Gallery

The Content Type Gallery is the modernized view of the Content Type Hub in the SharePoint Admin Center's Content Services Content type gallery. It provides a modern view of the Content Types defined there, and will eventually provide more sophisticated content management tools.

Content Type Hub

The Content Type Hub is a Site Collection where you can manage Content Types and Site Columns which should be available across your entire tenant. The Content Type Hub is older technology and generally is used less than in the past, primarily because it is slow to publish and it published to all Site Collections in the tenant. There is a modernized view of the Content Type Hub in the SharePoint Admin Center's Content Services Content Type Gallery.

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces new rules for organizations that offer goods and services to people in the European Union (EU), or that collect and analyze data for EU residents no matter where you or your enterprise are located.

Authenticator App

The Microsoft Authenticator app provides an additional level of security to your Azure AD work or school account or your Microsoft account and is available for Android and iOS. With the Microsoft Authenticator app, users can authenticate in a passwordless way during sign-in, or as an additional verification option during self-service password reset (SSPR) or Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication events.

Cyber Security Reference Architectures

The Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures (MCRA) describe Microsoft's cybersecurity capabilities. The diagrams describe how Microsoft security capabilities integrate with Microsoft platforms and 3rd party platforms like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, 3rd party apps like ServiceNow and salesforce, and 3rd party platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Compliance Center

The Microsoft Purview compliance portal provides easy access to the data and tools you need to manage to your organization's compliance needs.

Community

The Microsoft Technical Community is a wonderful place. If you are not using it then you are truly missing out.

Azure Marketplace

The Microsoft commercial marketplace is a catalog of solutions from our independent software vendor (ISV) partners. As an ISV member of the Microsoft Partner Network, you can create, publish, and manage your commercial marketplace offers in Partner Center. Your solutions are listed together with our Microsoft solutions, connecting you to businesses, organizations, and government agencies around the world.

Enterprise Applications

The Microsoft identity platform supports authentication for a variety of modern app architectures, all of them based on industry-standard protocols such as OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect.

Content Explorer

The data classification content explorer allows you to natively view the items that were summarized on the overview page from within the Microsoft Purview compliance portal.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

The planning and practice of ensuring systems are available when a disaster occurs or that they can be restored as quickly as possible.

Accessibility

There is no limit to what people can achieve when technology reflects the diversity of all who use it. Microsoft are dedicated to providing accessibility tools and features that help people achieve more at home, school, and work.

Cyber Essentials Plus

This is a UK government-backed scheme designed to help organizations assess and mitigate risks from common cyber security threats to their IT systems. It identifies security controls for an organization to have in place within their IT systems. Cyber Essentials scheme is a requirement for all UK government suppliers handling any personal data.

Delve

Use Delve to manage your Microsoft 365 profile, and to discover and organize the information that's likely to be most interesting to you right now - across Microsoft 365.

Content Search

Use the Content search tool in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal to quickly find email in Exchange mailboxes, documents in SharePoint sites and OneDrive locations, and instant messaging conversations.

Audit Log

Use the audit log search tool in Microsoft Purview compliance portal to search the unified audit log to view user and administrator activity in your organization.

Alert Policies

You can use the alert policy and alert dashboard tools in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal or the Microsoft 365 Defender portal to create alert policies and then view the alerts generated when users perform activities that match the conditions of an alert policy.

Direct Routing

You're ready to add cloud voice workloads to Microsoft Teams, and you've decided to use your own telephony carrier for Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connectivity by using Phone System Direct Routing. With Direct Routing, you can use Phone System with virtually any telephony carrier.