Microsoft 365 Glossary

Note

This is an open-source article with the community providing support for it. For official Microsoft content, see Microsoft 365 documentation.

As with any technology, there are lots of terms we toss around to explain things. Just understanding what each term means can be half the battle. Whether you are entirely new to Microsoft 365 or have been using it for years, there are always new terms to learn. The fact that Microsoft uses common English words for many capabilities can add an additional layer of confusion.

This Glossary is an attempt to demystify some of the terms and acronyms we use every day in working with the platform. See one missing? Feel free to add an Issue with what you want added.

Also consider checking out the additional glossaries listed in the Additional Resources section.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Access

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

Access Reviews

Microsoft Entra 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Always on VPN

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

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.

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.

Application Customizer

See SharePoint Framework

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.

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.

Application Proxy

Microsoft Entra application proxy provides secure remote access to on-premises web applications. After a single sign-on to Microsoft Entra ID, users can access both cloud and on-premises applications through an external URL or an internal application portal.

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.

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.

Authenticator App

The Microsoft Authenticator app provides an additional level of security to your Microsoft Entra 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 Microsoft Entra multifactor authentication events.

Microsoft Entra ID

Microsoft Entra ID is the Microsoft 365 source for all identity management, and much more. For example, Microsoft 365 Groups and applications permissions are stored in Microsoft Entra ID.

Microsoft Entra Connect

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

Microsoft Entra Connect cloud sync

Microsoft Entra 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 Microsoft Entra ID. It accomplishes this by using the Microsoft Entra cloud provisioning agent instead of the Microsoft Entra Connect application. However, it can be used alongside Microsoft Entra Connect Sync.

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.

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.

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.

B

B2B

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

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.

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.

Billing

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

Best Practices

Best practices for collaborating with Microsoft 365.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Business Data Services (BDS)

C

Calendar

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

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.

See Wikipedia. Also see Pascal Case

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.

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.

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.

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.

Command Set

See SharePoint Framework

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.

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.

Community

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

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.

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.

Conditional Access

Microsoft Entra 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Content Type

See: What is a Content Type?

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.

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.

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.

Customization

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

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.

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).

D

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).

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is built upon Microsoft Dataverse, and provides a 'lite' version equivalent, for free, under the existing licensing requirements of Microsoft 365.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

E

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.

E3 licencing (Microsoft 365)

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

E5 licencing (Office 365)

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

E5 licencing (Microsoft 365)

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

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 Viva Engage.

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.

Entitlement Management

Microsoft Entra 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

F

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.

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.

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.

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.

FIDO2

Sign in to web-based applications with your Microsoft Entra account using a FIDO2 security key.

Field Customizer

See SharePoint Framework

File Plan

Although you can create and manage retention labels from Information governance in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, file plan from Records management has additional management capabilities.

First Release

Deprecated - please see Targeted Release.

Flat SharePoint Architecture

In the modern SharePoint experience, sub-sites are not recommended. In the new “flat” world of modern SharePoint, plan to create one site for each discrete topic, task, or unit of work. This will allow you to easily distribute management and accountability for each content collection and support your ability to move sites around in your navigational architecture without breaking links.

Flow (Power Automate)

Flows in Power Automate is a service that you can use to automate repetitive tasks to bring efficiencies to any organisation. You can create cloud flows, desktop flows, or business process flows.

Folders

With your files saved to OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams, you can create files and folders to manage your work.

FormatDateTime function in a Flow

Customize/format Date and Time values in a flow

Formatting list views (SharePoint)

In Microsoft 365, Microsoft Lists, and SharePoint Online, you can improve the display of views in lists by adding formatting. The view formatting text describes the elements that are displayed and their display styles.

Forms

Microsoft Forms allows your users to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more.

Formula bar (PowerApps)

One of the most used items in the canvas authoring experience is the formula bar where everyone crafts their expressions.

Front Door (Azure)

Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry-point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to create fast, secure, and widely scalable web applications.

Frontline workforce

Frontline workers are employees whose primary function is to work directly with customers or the general public providing services, support, and selling products, or employees directly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of products or services. Your frontline workforce is essential to your business. Invest in them with simple, intuitive, and secure solutions from Microsoft 365

Fundamentals

Microsoft 365 Certified: Fundamentals is a certification to prove that you understand the options available in Microsoft 365 and the benefits of adopting cloud services, the Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud model and implementing Microsoft 365 cloud service.

G

GCC

To meet the unique and evolving requirements of the United States Federal, State, Local, and Tribal governments, as well as contractors holding or processing data on behalf of the US Government, Microsoft offers the Office 365 Government GCC environment.

GCC High

To meet the unique and evolving requirements of the United States Department of Defense, as well as contractors holding or processing DoD controlled unclassified information (CUI) or subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Microsoft offers GCC High and DoD environments.

GDPR

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.

GitHub

GitHub is where over 73 million developers shape the future of software, together and contribute to the open source community,

Global Administrator

Users with this role have access to all administrative features in Microsoft Entra ID, as well as services that use Microsoft Entra identities like the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, the Microsoft Purview compliance portal, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Skype for Business Online. Furthermore, Global Administrators can elevate their access to manage all Azure subscriptions and management groups.

Global Reader

Users in this role can read settings and administrative information across Microsoft 365 services but can't take management actions. Global Reader is the read-only counterpart to Global Administrator.

Governance

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management provides capabilities to govern your data for compliance or regulatory requirements.

Graph API

The Microsoft Graph API offers a single endpoint, Microsoft Graph, to provide access to rich, people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft cloud, including Microsoft 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. You can use REST APIs or SDKs to access the endpoint and build apps that support Microsoft 365 scenarios, spanning across productivity, collaboration, education, people and workplace intelligence, and much more.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

A graphical user interface (GUI) is a user interface that incorporates graphical elements, such as windows, icons, and buttons – unlike a command-line interface (CLI), which is text-based.

Group Policy Analytics

Analyse and move workloads to Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Intune with Group Policy Analytics

Groups

Add members to groups in Microsoft 365 to simplify administration.

Group

A Group in SharePoint can generally refer to one of three things. It may mean:

SharePoint Group

A container to organize users and other security groups. A SharePoint group can be assigned permission levels on an object such as a site, a list or library, a folder or a document (or page, or item). Generally only a Site Owner can manage who is in a SharePoint Group.

Microsoft 365 Group

A Microsoft 365 Groups is a concept which lets the members of the Group easily collaborate. It provides a collection of resources such as a shared Outlook mailbox including a shared calendar, a SharePoint Team site with a document library and a Notebook, as well as a Planner Board, a Power BI workspace and a Stream Video portal.

A Group is the foundation of a Microsoft Teams Team. A Team gives users within that Group channels to collaborate in the context that is relevant to their work and the ability to have scheduled and ad-hoc meetings. Teams can be public (they can be accessed by everyone inside of the organization), private (users need to be invited explicitly) or org-wide (everyone in the organization is automatically a member of this team). Roles and permissions are simplified to Owner (create, delete, manage memberships), Member (collaborate, create channels and add tabs) and Guest. Guests are outside of the organization and need to be added explicitly as an External User, otherwise they can't see nor access a Team. They can only work in the structure provided to them, which means they can't add tabs, apps or channels.

Security Group

A security group is a container of users defined in Active Directory, one or more of these can be added to SharePoint Groups. Adding users in the security groups applies permissions in SharePoint.

H

Headspace (Microsoft Viva Insights)

Viva Insights has introduced a curated set of guided meditations and Focus music from Headspace. Reach these resources on the Home page to help you start your day grounded, relax your mind before a big presentation, or find focus before starting an important project. In just a few minutes a day, meditation and mindfulness with Headspace can help you decrease stress and increase focus.

Health Attestation

The Device Health Attestation (DHA) service validates the TPM and PCR logs for a device and then issues a DHA report.

Hello for Business (Windows)

In Windows 10, Windows Hello for Business replaces passwords with strong two-factor authentication on devices. This authentication consists of a new type of user credential that is tied to a device and uses a biometric or PIN.

Highlighted Content Web Part

The Highlighted Content Web Part allows you to roll up content from allows you to specify content sources, sorting and filtering, and layout options.

As with all web parts in SharePoint, this we part will only display content which the current user has permission to see.

Hololens

An ergonomic, untethered self-contained holographic device with enterprise-ready applications to increase user accuracy and output.

Home Site

A Home site is the top site of your intranet. It is a Communication Site with a few extra superpowers:

• The Home Site is the destination for the home icon in the SharePoint mobile app.

• The Home Site provides an organization-wide search scope, making ALL content in your tenant findable.

• The Home Site is set up as an organization news site.

Home sites are intended for use as the landing page for your organization. There is only one Home Site per tenant allowed and its set using PowerShell

Hub Site

A Hub Site is a SharePoint site that can have other sites associated to it. This allows you to group sites by department, region, or project, etc. Features such as News, Events, and Highlighted Content can be used to produce rolled up views of content - like pages and documents from the associated sites - on a page on the Hub Site.

Hybrid Exchange

A hybrid deployment offers organizations the ability to extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control they have with their existing on-premises Microsoft Exchange organization to the cloud. A hybrid deployment provides the seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organization between an on-premises Exchange organization and Exchange Online.

Hybrid Identity

Today, businesses, and corporations are becoming more and more a mixture of on-premises and cloud applications. Users require access to those applications both on-premises and in the cloud. Managing users both on-premises and in the cloud poses challenging scenarios. Microsoft’s identity solutions span on-premises and cloud-based capabilities. These solutions create a common user identity for authentication and authorization to all resources, regardless of location. This is called hybrid identity.

I

Idempotent

In a development sense, idempotent means that code you run more than once with the same inputs will always produce the same outputs. In other words, you can always expect the same effects, no matter how many times you do something.

Identity Models

Microsoft 365 uses Microsoft Entra ID, a cloud-based user identity and authentication service that is included with your Microsoft 365 subscription, to manage identities and authentication for Microsoft 365. Getting your identity infrastructure configured correctly is vital to managing Microsoft 365 user access and permissions for your organization.

Information Barriers

Microsoft cloud services include powerful communication and collaboration capabilities. But suppose that you want to restrict communication and collaboration between two groups to avoid a conflict of interest from occurring in your organization. Or, perhaps you want to restrict communication and collaboration between certain people inside your organization in order to safeguard internal information. Microsoft 365 enables communication and collaboration across groups and organizations, so is there a way to restrict communication and collaboration among specific groups of users when necessary? With information barriers, you can!

Information Governance

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management provides capabilities to govern your data for compliance or regulatory requirements.

Information Protection

Implement capabilities from Microsoft Purview Information Protection to help you discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it lives or travels. MIP capabilities are included with Microsoft 365 Compliance and give you the tools to know your data, protect your data, and prevent data loss.

Inheritance

Inheritance refers to the cascading of default site permission levels (i.e. Owner, Member and Visitor) to site Document Libraries, Lists, Site Pages etc.

Inheritance can be "broken" to allow for unique permissions.

Insider Risk Management

Insider risk management in Microsoft 365 uses the full breadth of service and 3rd-party indicators to help you quickly identify, triage, and act on risky user activity. By using logs from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph, insider risk management allows you to define specific policies to identify risk indicators. After identifying the risks, you can take action to mitigate these risks.

Intune

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based service that focuses on mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM). You control how your organization’s devices are used, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. You can also configure specific policies to control applications.

J

Javascript

Often abbreviated JS, Javascript is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS.

Join a Teams meeting

Join a Microsoft Teams meeting from your calendar or sign in as a guest on the web.

Journaling

Journaling can help your organization respond to legal, regulatory, and organizational compliance requirements by recording inbound and outbound email communications. When planning for messaging retention and compliance, it's important to understand journaling, how it fits in your organization's compliance policies, and how Exchange Online helps you secure journaled messages.

JSON

JSON is a standard format for representing structured data as text. JSON is commonly used to store data in text files and to exchange data between programs over a network. JSON files usually have a .json filename extension.

Junk Email

In Microsoft 365 organizations with mailboxes in Exchange Online, organizational anti-spam settings are controlled by Exchange Online Protection (EOP). For more information, see Anti-spam protection in EOP. But there are also specific anti-spam settings that admins can configure on individual mailboxes in Exchange Online:

Just-enough-Access

Just-enough-access is the core principle of Privileged Access Management in Microsoft 365 and enables on-demand access to roles and tasks instead of having them permanently assigned.

Just-in-Time (JIT) Access

Just-in-Time access is the core principle of Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management and provides users with access to privileged roles on-demand instead of having them permanently assigned.

K

Kaizala

Microsoft Kaizala is a mobile app and service designed for large group communications and work management. Kaizala makes it easy to connect and coordinate work with your entire value chain, including field employees, vendors, partners, and customers wherever they are. With Kaizala you efficiently assign and track tasks or collect data with individuals or large groups–even if they’re not within your organisation.

Kanban

When it comes to day-to-day task management for teams, the Kanban board is a simple and powerful tool that can have a big impact on your productivity, efficiency, and bottom line. First popularized in the 1940s by Toyota in Japan, the Kanban solution has a long history of using physical boards to help visualize potential bottlenecks and manage and improve workflow. Today, it’s also easy to create digital boards using task management software, which offers many convenient features and customization to help you save time and automate processes.

Known Folder Move (KFM)

Known Folder Move (KFM) allows you to automatically backup/redirect your Windows client's Desktops, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive for Business. It gives you a transparent way to ensure your local files are never lost. Known Folder Move is now known as OneDrive PC Folder Backup.

KQL Query Experience (eDiscovery tool)

The new KQL query experience in Microsoft 365 eDiscovery tools search provides feedback and guidance when you build search queries in Content search, Core eDiscovery, and Advanced eDiscovery. When you type queries in the editor, it provides autocompletion for supported searchable properties and conditions and provides lists of supported values for standard properties and conditions.

Kusto Query Language

Kusto Query Language is a powerful tool to explore your data and discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, create statistical modeling, and more. The query uses schema entities that are organized in a hierarchy similar to SQL's: databases, tables, and columns.

Kubernetes (Azure)

Deploy and manage containerised applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications with confidence.

L

Learn

Whether you're just starting or an experienced professional, Microsoft Learn training’s hands-on approach helps you arrive at your goals faster, with more confidence and at your own pace.

Lens

Office Lens is a great way to capture notes and information from whiteboards, menus, signs, handwritten memos, or anything with a lot of text. You don’t need to jot down notes, rely on blurry images, or worry about misplacing anything. It’s great for capturing sketches, drawings and equations too, and even images without text.

Library

See: Document library

Licensing

Microsoft 365 offers multiple licensing options (Kiosk, F1, E1, etc.), each of which turns on a different basket of capabilities for the user to whom the license is assigned.

Lighthouse (Azure)

Gain full transparency into service provider actions and manage access without compromising security. Decide who can access your tenant, what they can access, and when. Talk to your service partners about implementing these security and access control protocols for free with Azure Lighthouse.

List

A List in SharePoint is a table used to store information in a SharePoint site. A list has columns that can be used to store different types of information, and each row in a list is known as an "Item". SharePoint attempts you to very carefully design lists if you attempt to store "large" amounts of data (more than 5,000 items), including things like limiting the number of "Lookup Columns" that can be used. Therefore, if you are planning on storing more than a few thousand items, be sure to follow Microsoft guidelines on storing large amounts of data in lists.

An item in a list can have multiple file attachments added. This is useful if you use a custom list as an Issue Tracker for example, and want to be able to add screenshots to an item in.

A library is a type of list where documents or other files are added as items, but no further file attachments can be added.

Live Events (Teams)

With Teams live events, users in your organization can broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences. Microsoft 365 live events bring live video streaming to a new level. Live events encourage connection throughout the entire engagement lifecycle with attendees before, during, and after live events. You can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides, using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Viva Engage.

Log Analytics

Log Analytics is a tool in the Azure portal used to edit and run log queries with data in Azure Monitor Logs. You may write a simple query that returns a set of records and then use features of Log Analytics to sort, filter, and analyze them.

Logic Apps (Azure)

Azure Logic Apps s a cloud-based platform for creating and running automated workflows that integrate your apps, data, services, and systems. With this platform, you can quickly develop highly scalable integration solutions for your enterprise and business-to-business (B2B) scenarios

Loop

Microsoft Loop is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps.

M

Managed Metadata

Managed Metadata is a SharePoint feature that allows the business to create a hierarchy of terms that can be used in SharePoint Sites to tag content. This is used by creating the hierarchy using Term Groups and Term Sets, then adding a column to a list of type "Managed Metadata" and setting the Term Set to use for tagging. When an item is added to that list or library, the new column is used to tag that item or document.

Managed Property

A Managed Property is one of the basic units of the SharePoint Search Schema. It's an entry in the Schema that you refer to when doing search queries that use specific properties, or when specifying which information you want to return.

Managed Properties can be created (if you have the appropriate permissions), although SharePoint automatically creates Managed Properties that are useful for a wide range of scenarios.

Meetings (Teams)

Meetings in Teams include audio, video, and screen sharing. They're one of the key ways to collaborate in Teams. And you don’t need to be a member of an organization (or even have a Teams account!) to join a Teams meeting—just look in the invitation for instructions about calling in.

Meeting Policies (Teams)

Meeting policies are used to control the features that are available to meeting participants for meetings that are scheduled by users in your organization. You can use the global (Org-wide default) policy that's automatically created or create and assign custom policies. You manage meeting policies in the Microsoft Teams admin center or by using PowerShell.

Meeting Settings (Teams)

As an admin, you use Teams meetings settings to control whether anonymous users can join Teams meetings, customize meeting invitations, and if you want to enable Quality of Service (QoS), set port ranges for real-time traffic. These settings apply to all Teams meetings that users schedule in your organization. You manage these settings from Meetings > Meeting settings in the Microsoft Teams admin center.

Messaging Policies (Teams)

Messaging policies are used to control which chat and channel messaging features are available to users (owners and members) in Microsoft Teams. You can use the global (Org-wide default) policy that's created automatically or create and assign custom messaging policies.

Mesh

Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications.

Metadata

Generically, metadata means information about something else. In SharePoint metadata is additional information applied to documents, pages, or list items. We use metadata all the time in our lives, but rarely think of it as metadata. For example, the information we write on a file we put into a filing cabinet or the way we organize spices in the kitchen is driven by metadata.

Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)

A Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) is a person who has successfully completed professional training for Microsoft products through a certification program run by Microsoft.

Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)

Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) are the premier technical and instructional experts in Microsoft technologies. Join this exclusive group of worldwide Microsoft technical training professionals and reap the benefits of MCT training certification and membership.

Migration

Microsoft 365 or Office 365 supports several methods to migrate email, calendar, and contact data from your existing messaging environment to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 as described in Ways to migrate multiple email accounts to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.

Mobile Application Management (MAM)

Intune mobile application management refers to the suite of Intune management features that lets you publish, push, configure, secure, monitor, and update mobile apps for your users. MAM allows you to manage and protects your organization's data within an application. With MAM without enrollment (MAM-WE), a work or school-related app that contains sensitive data can be managed on almost any device, including personal devices in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios. Many productivity apps, such as the Microsoft Office apps, can be managed by Intune MAM. See the official list of Microsoft Intune protected apps available for public use.

Mobile Device Management (MDM)

Configuration Manager on-premises mobile device management (MDM) is a device management solution that relies on the built-in management capabilities of Windows. This feature is based on the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Device Management (DM) standard.

Modern SharePoint

Modern SharePoint refers to the user interface (UI) that has been available in SharePoint Online to larger and larger degrees starting in about 2016. Some aspects of the modern UI are also available in SharePoint 2019 (on premises). Modern SharePoint does not use many of the underpinnings of classic SharePoint, such as master pages and page layouts. It is built using more current Web development tools and practices than classic SharePoint.

Modern Workplace

The nature of work has changed. Employees expect to work securely from anywhere, on any device, and they put a high premium on work that enriches and fulfills them. When their productivity tools enhance the quality and effectiveness of their work experience, they’re happier, more valuable, and more likely to stay. Companies need to provide that empowerment, but they also need to protect vital IT assets. It’s a fundamental operational change for your organisation. With Microsoft Modern Workplace solutions, you can improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and create more seamless communication and collaboration across locations and platforms while maintaining the security and integrity of systems and data.

Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

The MVP Award is a global program of recognized technology experts and community leaders who actively support technical communities through unique, innovative, and consistent knowledge sharing. These community leaders actively contribute to support the developer and IT Pro communities worldwide, helping them learn, build, and use our products. Learn below what seek for recognition in future community leaders.

Multifactor authentication (MFA)

Multifactor authentication refer to an additional security layer beyond just username and password. One way it is described is the user name and password shows who you are based on something you know, and MFA shows who you are by something you have. The most common example of MFA is the code you get in a text on your phone when you are logging into sites like your bank or Github.

N

Namespace

A namespace refers to the conventions we use to determine major and minor names within a specific domain. For example, we need to use the /sites namespace carefully so we don't have collisions. If Harold Robinson wants to create a site at /sites/HRm, then Human Resources will have a problem.

In programming, namespaces can be far more complex - like List.Fields within Microsoft.SharePoint.Client - but we worry about namespacing in our day-to-day lives, too. It wouldn't work very well if all our children were named Daryl.

Named Locations

Locations are named in the Azure portal under Microsoft Entra ID > Security > Conditional Access > Named locations. These named network locations may include locations like an organization's headquarters network ranges, VPN network ranges, or ranges that you wish to block. Named locations can be defined by IPv4/IPv6 address ranges or by countries/regions.

Network Policy Server (NPS)

The Network Policy server is one of the technologies you’ll need to configure when deploying Always on VPN.

Network Assessment

In the Microsoft 365 Admin Center's network connectivity, network assessments distill an aggregate of many network performance metrics into a snapshot of your enterprise network perimeter health. A network assessment tells you how much the customer responsible network design is impacting Office 365 user experience.

Network Settings (Teams)

Network settings that are common to Location-Based Routing and dynamic emergency calling.

Network Topology (Teams)

If your organization is deploying Location-Based Routing for Direct Routing or dynamic emergency calling, you must configure network settings for use with these cloud voice features in Microsoft Teams. Network settings are used to determine the location of a Teams client and include network regions, network sites, subnets, and trusted IP addresses.

Non Profit licencing

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is dedicated to providing affordable and accessible technology and tools to help nonprofits of all sizes achieve their missions. That’s why Microsoft offer grants and discounts of their products and services to eligible nonprofits around the world, including Microsoft 365 and Office 365. To qualify for nonprofit grants and discounts, you must hold recognized charitable status in your country/region and sign Microsoft’s non-discrimination policy. Microsoft reserves the right to verify eligibility at any time and to suspend the service for ineligible organizations.

O

OAuth

The Microsoft identity platform endpoint for identity-as-a-service implements authentication and authorization with the industry standard protocols OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OAuth 2.0, respectively. While the service is standards-compliant, there can be subtle differences between any two implementations of these protocols.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

Many organizations have started to adopt objectives and key results (OKRs). OKRs have proven to drive alignment in complex work environments, foster innovation, and help individuals to focus on what matters. The two components comprising OKRs are an objective and key results for that objective. An objective is the statement of intent: what is the team trying to accomplish, and why is it important? Key results are specific outcomes that track impact on the objective.

OBS

Now you can schedule, produce, and deliver live events more effectively for a variety of scenarios like company wide events, leadership updates, training and more using Microsoft Stream.

OEM licensing

OEM software is software that comes pre-installed when you purchase a new computer. When you purchase a new PC it may come with an OEM licensed copy of Windows 11 pre-installed on it.

Office

With Microsoft Office, you can deploy, configure, and manage Office products and services in your business or school – from small to enterprise scale.

On premises

On premises refers to running servers yourself, whether they are in your physical building, a data center where you rent space, or at a hosting company that runs servers specifically for you.

On Premises Data Gateway

The on-premises data gateway acts as a bridge to provide quick and secure data transfer between on-premises data (data that isn't in the cloud) and several Microsoft cloud services. These cloud services include Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, Azure Analysis Services, and Azure Logic Apps. By using a gateway, organizations can keep databases and other data sources on their on-premises networks, yet securely use that on-premises data in cloud services.

OneDrive for Business

OneDrive for work and school accounts is online storage space in the cloud that's provided for individual licensed users in an organization. Use it to help protect work files and access them across multiple devices. OneDrive lets you share files and collaborate on documents, and sync files to your computer.

OneDrive PC Folder Backup

This capability was originally called Known Folder Move (KFM). It allows you to automatically backup/redirect your Windows client's Desktops, Documents, and Pictures folders to OneDrive for Business. It gives you a transparent way to ensure your local files are never lost.

OneNote

OneNote is a popular note-taking tool that's available online and on many mobile and tablet platforms. By integrating your apps with OneNote, it's easier than ever to create empowering apps on your favorite platforms and reach millions of users worldwide.

Open Data Protocol

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming REST APIs. It enables creation of REST-based services which allow resources identified using Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and defined in a data model, to be published and edited by Web clients using simple HTTP messages.

Open Value Program

Microsoft Open Value and Open Value Subscription are a simple, cost-effective way for small and midsize organizations to acquire the latest Microsoft technology.

Out of the box

Capabilities included with SharePoint without writing any code or doing heavy lifting. Depending on who you talk to, this definition probably includes a level of customization including things like creating new sites, lists, and libraries.

Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is an email program for Windows, Mac, and mobile operating systems. Outlook may be used for personal accounts and also work or school accounts.

P

Pascal Case

In programming, Pascal case is the practice of naming variables or controls by capitalizing all words. Examples: TotalQuantity, EmailAddress, ShippingPlant.

See Wikipedia. Also see Camel Case

Patterns and Practices (PnP)

Patterns and Practices (PnP) is an open-source initiative coordinated by SharePoint engineering. This community controls SharePoint development documentation, samples, reusable controls, and other relevant open-source initiatives related to SharePoint development.

Permission Level

A Permission Level is a set of specific permissions such as "Add an item" or "Edit Lists". SharePoint comes with a set of Permission Levels as standard, such as "Contribute" or "Design", which have different capabilities.

Custom Permission Levels can be created for business-specific scenarios, such as "Can add documents but not delete" by choosing the correct options, and applied to a User or Group.

Phishing

Phishing attacks attempt to steal sensitive information through emails, websites, text messages, or other forms of electronic communication. They try to look like official communication from legitimate companies or individuals.

Planner

Microsoft Planner is an intuitive, collaborative task management tool that enables people to plan, manage, and complete task-based initiatives. Users assign and manage tasks on a Kanban board using task cards, which they can populate with various important plan information, such as due dates, status, checklists, labels, and file attachments. Planner integrates with several Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Teams. As a web-based tool, Planner is accessible from anywhere and available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android.

PnP

See Patterns and Practices

PowerApps

Power Apps is a low-code/no-code development platform that provides a means for both Citizen Developers and Pro-Developers to build custom apps for your business needs.

Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Excel, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server).

Power Automate

Power Automate is a low-code/no-code workflow platform that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data and more.

Power Automate provides a means to quickly automate your workflows, enable business logic to simplify app building, and model your processes across connected data sources and services.

Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft's Business Intelligence and Reporting application. It allows you to connect and visualize any data using the unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI) that’s easy to use and helps you gain deeper data insight.

Power BI provides a simple, intuitive, easy to use experience for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.

PowerPoint

Create, share, and effectively present your ideas. Design impactful slides with the help of Designer in PowerPoint.

PowerShell

PowerShell is an automation scripting language from Microsoft, which was originally only available on Windows devices, and built on top of the .NET Framework. Since 2016, we also have PowerShell Core which is open-source, cross-platform, and built on top of .NET Core.

The version that ships on Windows devices is called Windows PowerShell, and the cross-platform version is called PowerShell Core, and is also available on Windows.

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) empowers organizations to create powerful bots using a guided, no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers.

Using Power Virtual Agents, you can:

• Empower your teams by allowing them to easily build bots themselves without needing intermediaries, or coding or AI expertise.
• Reduce costs by easily automating common inquiries and freeing human agent time to deal with more complex issues.
• Improve customer satisfaction by allowing customers to self-help and resolve issues quickly 24/7 using rich personalized bot conversations.

Power Platform Data Loss Prevention

A set of policies that can be applied to the Power Platform tenant or environment to prevent data leakage by grouping connectors deemed for business or personal use to be used together. Additionally, connectors can be blocked from any use and new connectors can be added by default to the business, personal, or blocked group as needed. Custom connectors can also be classified at the environment level.

Power Platform Environment

A Power Platform Environment is a container that administrators can use to manage apps, automations, connections, and other assets; along with permissions to allow organizational users to use the resources.

There are multiple types of environments that an organization can create (Developer, Sandbox, Production). The type indicates the purpose of the environment and determines its characteristics.

Project

Microsoft Project offers the following applications to help meet your organization's needs for project and work management:

Project for the web

Project Online

Project Online desktop client

Public Folders

Public folders are designed for shared access and provide an easy and effective way to collect, organize, and share information with other people in your workgroup or organization. Public folders help organize content in a deep hierarchy that's easy to browse. Users will see the full hierarchy in Outlook, which makes it easy for them to browse for the content they're interested in.

Putability

The term 'putability' is the complement to the term 'findability'; it is a measure of how easy and obvious it is for content creators to know where to store or create files or other information in a system. It is linked to elements of UI and UX design, leaning on information architecture, signposting, and navigation.

Q

QBasic

QBasic is Quick Basic interpreter.This application can be used to run quick basic program and software developed for your Windows10 desktop or tablet.

QnA Maker

QnA Maker is a cloud-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that allows you to create a natural conversational layer over your data. It is used to find the most appropriate answer for any input from your custom knowledge base (KB) of information. QnA Maker is commonly used to build conversational client applications, which include social media applications, chat bots, and speech-enabled desktop applications.

QR code for Windows 10

CODEX - QR Reader and Generator app is an app to Scan QR Code on Windows from your Camera or File. It even lets you generate any type of QR Code with no expiration time for free.

Quantum (Azure)

An open ecosystem that provides access to diverse quantum software, hardware, and solutions from Microsoft and partners.

Quantum (Microsoft)

Quantum computing presents unprecedented possibilities to solve society’s most complex challenges. Microsoft is committed to responsibly turning these possibilities into reality – for the betterment of humanity and the planet. Over decades of research and development, Microsoft has achieved advancements across every layer of the quantum stack – including software, applications, devices and controls – and is delivering true impact today through quantum-inspired classical computing.

Quarantine

In Microsoft 365 organizations with mailboxes in Exchange Online or standalone Exchange Online Protection (EOP) organizations without Exchange Online mailboxes, quarantine holds potentially dangerous or unwanted messages. For more information, see Quarantined email messages in EOP.

Quorum

Quorum is designed to prevent split-brain scenarios which can happen when there is a partition in the network and subsets of nodes cannot communicate with each other. This can cause both subsets of nodes to try to own the workload and write to the same disk which can lead to numerous problems. However, this is prevented with Failover Clustering's concept of quorum which forces only one of these groups of nodes to continue running, so only one of these groups will stay online.

R

RBAC (Azure)

Access management for cloud resources is a critical function for any organization that is using the cloud. Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to. Azure RBAC is an authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management of Azure resources.

RBAC (Microsoft Entra ID)

Built-in roles are out of box roles that have a fixed set of permissions. These role definitions cannot be modified. There are many built-in roles that Microsoft Entra ID supports, and the list is growing. To round off the edges and meet your sophisticated requirements, Microsoft Entra ID also supports custom roles. Granting permission using custom Microsoft Entra roles is a two-step process that involves creating a custom role definition and then assigning it using a role assignment. A custom role definition is a collection of permissions that you add from a preset list. These permissions are the same permissions used in the built-in roles.

Remote Connectivity Analyzer

The Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer (ExRCA) helps you make sure that connectivity for your Exchange service is set up correctly. If you're having problems, it can also help you find and fix these problems. The ExRCA website can run tests to check for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Exchange Web Services, Microsoft Outlook, and internet email connectivity.

Remote Desktop Services

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is the platform of choice for building virtualization solutions for every end customer need, including delivering individual virtualized applications, providing secure mobile and remote desktop access, and providing end users the ability to run their applications and desktops from the cloud.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

Microsoft Remote Procedure Call (RPC) defines a powerful technology for creating distributed client/server programs. The RPC run-time stubs and libraries manage most of the processes relating to network protocols and communication. This enables you to focus on the details of the application rather than the details of the network.

Retention

For most organizations, the volume and complexity of their data is increasing daily—email, documents, instant messages, and more. Effectively managing or governing this information is important because you need to:

Comply proactively with industry regulations and internal policies that require you to retain content for a minimum period of time—for example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act might require you to retain certain types of content for seven years.

Reduce your risk in the event of litigation or a security breach by permanently deleting old content that you're no longer required to keep.

Help your organization to share knowledge effectively and be more agile by ensuring that your users work only with content that's current and relevant to them.

Rights Management

Azure Rights Management (Azure RMS) is the cloud-based protection technology used by Azure Information Protection. Azure RMS helps to protect files and emails across multiple devices, including phones, tablets, and PCs by using encryption, identity, and authorization policies. For example, when employees email a document to a partner company, or save a document to their cloud drive, Azure RMS's persistent protection helps secure the data.

Risk Management

Gain visibility into user activities, actions, and communications with native signals and enrichments from across your digital estate.

Roadmap

The Microsoft 365 Roadmap lists updates that are currently planned for applicable subscribers.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

In factories and manufacturing organizations, robots are nothing new. For decades, they’ve been improving productivity and freeing up workers to focus on other, higher-level tasks. And now that same level of productivity increase is coming to companies where employees perform high-volume business, IT support, and workflow processes—thanks to RPA.

Roll up

Rolling up content refer to the practice of consolidating a specific set of content from multiple locations. Common examples are:

• News from all sites associated with a Hub Site
• Events from all sites associated with a Hub Site

More complex roll ups are also possible using the Highlighted Content Web Part or custom code.

Root Site

The base address in a web application or tenant for the first SharePoint Site collection. Typically, defined without use of managed paths ("/sites/" or "/teams/"), for example https://mytenant.sharepoint.com. In an on-site installation, there may be a vanity URL in place, such as https://sharepoint or https://intranet.

S

SARA

The Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant works by running tests to figure out what's wrong and offers the best solution for the identified problem. It can currently fix Office, Microsoft 365, or Outlook problems. If the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant can't fix a problem for you, it will suggest next steps and help you get in touch with Microsoft support.

SCCM

Starting in version 1910, Configuration Manager current branch is now part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Version 1906 and earlier are still branded System Center Configuration Manager.

Screen Recorder

Screenshots work great, but sometimes a quick how-to video can create a more powerful message. Using Microsoft Stream, you can create short screen recordings of up to 15 minutes, including your camera and microphone, without any additional software.

SDK (Windows)

The Windows SDK (10.0.22000) for Windows 11 provides the latest headers, libraries, metadata, and tools for building Windows applications. Use this SDK to build Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Win32 applications for Windows 11 and previous Windows releases.

Seamless Single Sign-on (SSSO)

Microsoft Entra seamless single sign-on (Microsoft Entra seamless SSO) automatically signs users in when they are on their corporate devices connected to your corporate network. When enabled, users don't need to type in their passwords to sign in to Microsoft Entra ID, and usually, even type in their usernames. This feature provides your users easy access to your cloud-based applications without needing any additional on-premises components.

Search

Microsoft Search transforms the way people in your organization find the info they need—no matter where you are in your cloud journey. Either integrated with Microsoft 365 or as a standalone solution, Microsoft Search is a secure, easily managed, enterprise search experience that works across all of your applications and services to deliver more relevant search results and increase productivity.

Search Schema

The Search Schema refers to the customizable data dictionary used by SharePoint Search to allow users to query for and return specific information from SharePoint using the available Search tools, such as the Search Results web part in Classic SharePoint or the Search REST API.

Secure Score

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more improvement actions taken. It can be found in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal.

Self-service password reset (SSPR)

Microsoft Entra self-service password reset (SSPR) gives users the ability to change or reset their password, with no administrator or help desk involvement. If a user's account is locked or they forget their password, they can follow prompts to unblock themselves and get back to work. This ability reduces help desk calls and loss of productivity when a user can't sign in to their device or an application. Microsoft recommend this video on how to enable and configure SSPR in Microsoft Entra ID.

Sensitive information type

A defined pattern of data that can be identified in order to be protected by DLP or sensitivity labels. Common examples include social security numbers, credit card numbers but can also include any type of data considered sensitive by the organization that matches a pattern.

Sensitivity labels

Sensitivity labels from the Microsoft Purview Information Protection solution let you classify and protect your organization's data, while making sure that user productivity and their ability to collaborate isn't hindered.

Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution. Microsoft Sentinel delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, providing a single solution for attack detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response.

Session Border Controller (SBC)

Microsoft partners with selected Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors to certify that their SBCs work with Direct Routing.

SharePoint Framework

The SharePoint Framework (also known as SPFx) is a way for developers to extend SharePoint online, Microsoft Teams and in a slightly more limited way SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016. This framework provides a scaffold for developers to build client-side custom extensions which may include:

• Web Parts - functionality that can be added to a page. Web parts can also be extended as tabs in Microsoft Teams.
• Application Customizers - which are extensions that run on every page of a site and allow the developer to add visible or non-visible content to the page via the top or bottom placeholder
• Field Customizers - which allow the developer to build modified renderings of fields in a list.
• Command Sets - which extend the command surface in lists to provide custom actions.

SharePoint Home Page

Soon to be known as the SharePoint Start Page, this page (at /_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx in your tenant) provides a personalized view of SharePoint based on who you are. You see:

• A rolled up collection of News based on the sites you are following

• Sites you are following

• Sites you frequently visit

• Sites you've visited recently

• Featured links, curated by your tenant admins

• Suggested sites based on your activity, powered by the Office Graph

SharePoint Start Page

See SharePoint Home Page

SharePoint Online

Microsoft SharePoint is a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and seamlessly collaborate across the organization.

SharePoint Server

Beautiful and fast, familiar yet intuitive, SharePoint Server 2019 gives you instant access to people, applications, and content. You’ll spend less time searching for information and more time working with it.

Shifts

Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams, keeps your frontline workforce connected and in sync. It's built mobile first for fast and effective schedule management and communications. With Shifts, frontline managers and workers can seamlessly manage schedules and keep in touch.

Single Sign-on (SSO)

With SSO, your teams can use just one set of login credentials to conveniently access all their apps. No more memorizing multiple credentials or reusing passwords.

Site

In modern SharePoint, a site refers to a modern site. (In classic SharePoint, the term was often used for both sites and sub-sites.)

To developers, a "Site" is a Site Collection, whereas a "web" is a site. Confusing!

Site Column

A Site Column is a metadata column that has been defined at the site level. Site Columns are available for use in any list or library in the site where it is defined. Site Columns also become Crawled Properties (See: How Do Site Columns Become Managed Properties - Thus Available for Search) which can be used to improve search effectiveness.

Also see: See: What is a Site Column?

Site Collection

A Site Collection is a group of websites that have the same owner and share administrative settings.

• In SharePoint Online, site collections are the top level available to admins, and visible in the SharePoint Admin Center under "Active Sites".
• In SharePoint on-premises, site collections are created within a Web Application, which is a level higher.

When you create a site collection, a top-level site is automatically created in the site collection (called root site). You can then create one or more sub-sites below the top-level site. The entire structure of the top-level site and all its sub-sites is called a site collection.

SKU

A SKU is a Stock Keeping Unit, and in the context of Microsoft 365, a SKU refers to licencing bundles available for purchase.

Skype for Business

The on-premises version of Skype for business.

Skype for Business Online

Skype for Business Online retired on July 31, 2021, at which time access to the service ended. Microsoft Teams is now the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365.

Spam

In Microsoft 365 organizations with mailboxes in Exchange Online or standalone Exchange Online Protection (EOP) organizations without Exchange Online mailboxes, email messages are automatically protected against spam (junk email) by EOP.

SQL

Learn how to use SQL Server and Azure SQL, both on-premises and in the cloud.

SSL Certificate

To encrypt communications between your clients and the Microsoft 365 environment, third-party Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates must be installed on your infrastructure servers.

Standard Release

Standard Release is an option to receive updates to the Microsoft 365 platform when they are broadly available to all customers. This is the default option for new tenants and can be modified later on.

As both Standard and Targeted Release options can be applied to all or certain groups of users, it is a good practice to leave the majority of users in Standard Release and set the IT pros and power users in Targeted Release to evaluate new features and prepare teams to support business users and executives.

Style Library

The Style Library is a document library in the Root Web of a SharePoint site that is used mainly in Classic SharePoint Sites. One of the purposes of this library is as a recognized "secure location" to store XSL Templates that are used by the Content Query Web Part (XSL templates outside of the Style Library cannot be used in Content Query Web Parts).

Store

Download Windows apps for your Windows tablet or computer. Browse thousands of free and paid apps by category, read user reviews, and compare ratings.

Stream

With video that will be stored in Microsoft 365, the new version of Stream builds on the rich content management features of SharePoint and unlocks the intelligence of Microsoft Graph to enhance videos across Microsoft 365. The earlier version of Stream will now be known as Microsoft Stream (Classic) and the new version will be known as Microsoft Stream (built on SharePoint) or Stream (on SharePoint).

Subsite

A Site is a container that has lists, libraries, pages, apps, and sites (as children). A site that is a child of another site is a subsite.

Subsites tend to be less common on Modern SharePoint, as Microsoft recommend the use of Hub Sites to group together related sites.

Survivable branch Appliance (SBA)

Occasionally, a customer site using Direct Routing to connect to Microsoft Phone System may experience an internet outage. Assume that the customer site--called a branch--temporarily cannot connect to the Microsoft cloud through Direct Routing. However, the intranet inside the branch is still fully functional and users can connect to the Session Border Controller (SBC) that is providing PSTN connectivity. This is where using a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) will enable Microsoft Phone System to continue to make and receive Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) calls in the case of an outage.

Sway

Sway is an app from Microsoft Office that makes it easy to create and share interactive reports, personal stories, presentations, and more.

Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or dedicated options – at scale. Azure Synapse brings these worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, manage and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

T

Targeted Release

Targeted Release is an option to receive updates to the platform earlier than with Standard Release Targeted Release should not be used in production tenants (you need to decide how you define this), as there are occasions where Target Release functionality is buggy or is withdrawn. Consider it similar to the old term "beta".

Targeted Release can be enabled in two ways: per tenant and per user. The two different ways of setting this preference result in different changes. Some updates only make sense in the context of a tenant (e.g., Communication sites) and others can make sense in the context of a person. Giving users Targeted Release does not mean they will see all updates sooner, only those which make sense in a person context.

Finally, once you have Targeted Release turned on, it is very hard to go back. Your users will be used to new functionality, and you would be removing it. Thus the warning above about not using Targeted Release in a production tenant is also relevant from a change management perspective..

Taxonomy

Team Site

Team Sites are generally used to facilitate teamwork. It generally has a set of people with permissions to work on content collaboratively, though not all people can create or edit content in all cases.

Teams

Teams is built on Microsoft 365 groups, Microsoft Graph, and the same enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability as the rest of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Teams leverages identities stored in Microsoft Entra ID. Teams keeps working even when you're offline or experiencing spotty network conditions.

Teams Administrator roles

Using Microsoft Entra ID, you can designate administrators who need different levels of access for managing Microsoft Teams. Administrators can manage the entire Teams workload, or they can have delegated permissions for troubleshooting call quality problems or managing your organization's telephony needs.

Teams Advisor

Advisor for Teams walks you through your Microsoft Teams rollout. It assesses your Microsoft 365 organization environment and identifies the most common configurations that you may need to update or modify before you can successfully roll out Teams. Then, Advisor for Teams creates a Deployment team (in Teams), with channels for each workload you want to roll out. Each workload in the Deployment team comes with a comprehensive Planner plan that includes all the rollout tasks for each workload.

Teams Apps

As an admin, you can view and manage all Teams apps for your organization. The Manage apps page gives you a view into all available apps, providing you with the information you need to decide which apps to allow or block across your organization. You can then use app permission policies, app setup policies, and custom app policies and settings to configure the app experience for specific users in your organization.

Teams Devices

You can manage devices used with Microsoft Teams in your organization from the Microsoft Teams admin center. You can view and manage the device inventory for your organization and do tasks such as update, restart, and monitor diagnostics for devices. You can also create and assign configuration profiles to a device or groups of devices.

Teams Settings

In Teams settings, you can set up features for teams including notifications and feeds, email integration, cloud storage options, and devices.

Teams Policies

Policies are used to accomplish many tasks in your organization across different areas such as messaging, meetings, and applications. Some of the things you can do include allowing users to schedule meetings in a teams channel, enabling users to edit sent messages, and controlling whether users can pin apps to the Teams app bar.

Teams Rooms

Transform meeting spaces ranging from small huddle areas to large conference rooms with a rich, collaborative Teams experience that's simple to use, deploy, and manage. Start meetings on time with one-touch join, then instantly project to the display in the room and share to remote participants.

Team Templates

A team template in Microsoft Teams is a definition of a team's structure designed around a business need or project. As an admin, you can use templates to easily deploy consistent teams across your organization. With templates, your users can quickly create rich collaboration spaces with predefined settings, channels, and apps.

Teams Update Policies

Public Preview for Microsoft Teams provides early access to unreleased features in Teams. Previews allow you to explore and test upcoming features. We also welcome feedback on any feature in public previews. Public preview is enabled per Team user, so you don’t need to worry about affecting your entire organization.

Teams Upgrade Settings

When you upgrade your Skype for Business users to use Teams, you have several options to help you make it a seamless process for your users. You have the option to make coexistence and upgrade settings for all of the users in your organization at once, or you can make settings changes for a single or set of users in your organization. Note that older versions of Skype for Business clients may not honor these settings.

Tenant

Creating a path to your organization's digital transformation with cloud computing requires a firm foundation upon which your workers can rely for productivity, collaboration, performance, privacy, compliance, and security. Correct configuration of your Microsoft 365 tenants provides that foundation, leaving your workers to focus on getting their work done and your IT department to focus on end-to-end solutions that provide additional business value.

Threat & Vulnerability Management (TVM)

Threat and vulnerability management serves as an infrastructure for reducing organizational exposure, hardening endpoint surface area, and increasing organizational resilience.

Threat Analytics

Threat analytics is Microsoft’s in-product threat intelligence solution from expert Microsoft security researchers, designed to assist security teams to be as efficient as possible while facing emerging threats.

Threat Policies

Preset security policies provide a centralized location for applying all of the recommended spam, malware, and phishing policies to users at once. The policy settings are not configurable. Instead, they are set by us and are based on our observations and experiences in the datacenters for a balance between keeping harmful content away from users and avoiding unnecessary disruptions.

Threat Tracker

Threat Trackers are informative widgets and views that provide you with intelligence on different cybersecurity issues that might impact your company. For example, you can view information about trending malware campaigns using Threat Trackers.

TLS

Transport Layer Security (TLS), the successor of the now-deprecated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securing HTTPS remains the most publicly visible.

To Do

Microsoft To-Do is an intelligent task management app that makes it easy to plan and manage your day. Connect to Microsoft To-Do to manage your tasks from various services. You can perform actions such as creating tasks.

TPM

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology is designed to provide hardware-based, security-related functions. A TPM chip is a secure crypto-processor that is designed to carry out cryptographic operations. The chip includes multiple physical security mechanisms to make it tamper-resistant, and malicious software is unable to tamper with the security functions of the TPM.

Trials

Get a free trial and you’ll have access to the latest AI-powered apps, 1 TB of cloud storage per person, and premium mobile features to stay on top of things wherever you are on any device.

Trust Center

Microsoft Trust Center products are built with data in mind. Microsoft handle your data securely and in compliance with privacy and legal requirements.

U

UM Management role group

Members of this role group can manage Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) settings and features in Exchange Online.

Unified Audit Log

Need to find if a user viewed a specific document or purged an item from their mailbox? If so, you can 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. Thousands of user and admin operations performed in dozens of Microsoft 365 services and solutions are captured, recorded, and retained in your organization's unified audit log. Users in your organization can use the audit log search tool to search for, view, and export (to a CSV file) the audit records for these operations.

Unified Communications

Investing in a UC service that delivers a consistent, multi-device, UI and UX platform can free your organization from the need to download, install, and learn new software. With the right UC provider, all your communications are streamlined, reducing friction within your organization.

Unified Labeling

The Azure Information Protection unified labeling client for Windows helps you keep important documents and emails safe from people who shouldn't see them, even if your email is forwarded or your document is saved to another location. You can also use this client to open documents that other people have protected by using the Rights Management protection technology from Azure Information Protection.

Unique Permissions

Unique Permissions do not inherit default site permission levels and are applied to site Document Libraries, Lists, Site Pages etc.

Universal Print

Universal Print is a modern print solution that organizations can use to manage their print infrastructure through cloud services from Microsoft. Learn how to get access. Universal Print runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. When it's deployed with Universal Print–compatible printers, it doesn't require any on-premises infrastructure. Universal Print is a Microsoft 365 subscription-based service that organizations use to centralize print management through the Universal Print portal. It's fully integrated with Microsoft Entra ID and supports single sign-on scenarios.

Update Rings

Create update rings that specify how and when Windows as a Service updates your Windows 10/11 devices with feature and quality updates. With Windows 10/11, new feature and quality updates include the contents of all previous updates. As long as you've installed the latest update, you know your Windows devices are up to date. Unlike with previous versions of Windows, you now must install the entire update instead of part of an update.

Update Windows

In Windows 11, you decide when and how to get the latest updates to keep your device running smoothly and securely. To manage your options and see available updates, select Check for Windows updates. Or select Start > Settings > Windows Update.

Usage reports

You can easily see how people in your business are using Microsoft 365 services. For example, you can identify who is using a service a lot and reaching quotas, or who may not need a Microsoft 365 license at all. Perpetual license model will not be included in the reports. Reports are available for the last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, and 180 days. Data won't exist for all reporting periods right away. The reports become available within 48 hours.

Usage Summary Reports reader

Assign the Reports Reader or the Usage Summary Reports Reader role to anyone who's responsible for change management and adoption, but not necessarily an IT administrator. This role gives them access to the complete Productivity Score experience in the Microsoft 365 admin Center.

User Administrator role

Assign the User admin role to users who need to Add users and groups, Assign licenses, Manage most users properties, Create and manage user views, Update password expiration policies, Manage service requests, and Monitor service health

User Accounts

You can manage Microsoft 365 user accounts in several different ways, depending on your configuration. You can manage user accounts in the Microsoft 365 admin center, PowerShell, in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), or in the Microsoft Entra admin center.

User data search (eDiscovery)

The Data subject request tool was renamed to User data search in September 2021. There are a few changes in the tool that reflect the name change, but the functionality is the same.

User experience (UX)

The user experience (UX) is how people react to and feel about the user interface as they use it. Web pages can be straightforward and easy to use (good UX) or complex and confusing (bad UX). Think of UX as the feelings and emotions people have about the solutions you give them as and after they use them.

User interface (UI)

The user interface (UI) is what you see on the screen: the layout of the page, the controls you can use to accomplish things (like Web Parts), and where the text and images sit.

V

View

A View is a way to show data stored in a list or library. It consists of a set of columns that are shown, and a way to pre-filter and sort the information. A View can be considered as a rudimentary "Query" against a list that is used when visiting the list or library.

The most common settings we use in views allow us to:

• Choose which columns are displayed and in which order
• Filter the items based on the values in any of the columns
• Group items based on the value of most column types

View Formatting

View Formatting is a SharePoint feature that allows users to customize the display of rows in Lists using JSON code. Like Column Formatting, colors, icons, images and other elements are used to highlight content and improve the user experience.

Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)

The Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format is a publicly-available image format specification that allows encapsulation of the hard disk into an individual file for use by the operating system as a virtual disk in all the same ways physical hard disks are used. These virtual disks are capable of hosting native file systems (NTFS, FAT, exFAT, and UDFS) while supporting standard disk and file operations. VHD API support allows management of the virtual disks. Virtual disks created with the VHD API can function as boot disks.

Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines (VM) is one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources that Azure offers. Typically, you choose a VM when you need more control over the computing environment than the other choices offer.

Visio

Find how-to content, sample code, SDK and API documentation, VBA references, training, and technical articles for developing solutions and customizing Visio.

Virtual Private Networking (VPN)

When you install the DirectAccess and VPN (RAS) role service, you are deploying the Remote Access Service Gateway (RAS Gateway). You can deploy RAS Gateway as a single tenant RAS Gateway virtual private network (VPN) server that provides many advanced features and enhanced functionality.

Viva

An employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights.

Volume Licencing Service Center (VLSC)

The VLSC is where organizations manage licenses purchased via the following volume licensing programs: Microsoft Enterprise, Enterprise Subscription, Select Plus, Select, Academic – Education Enrolment or School Enrolment, Open Value, Open Value Subscription and Open Licenses programs.

W

Web Part

A web part is a consolidated piece of functionality that can be added one or more times to a page. Web parts can be first-party, those created and maintained by Microsoft or third-party being those created by developers in your own organization, the community via the PnP, or by a consulting service.

Also see SharePoint Framework

Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is an infinite, collaborative canvas for effective meetings and engaging learning. You can use Whiteboard to collaborate with other people and accomplish many activities, from brainstorming and planning to learning and workshops.

Windows 365

Windows 365 combines the power and security of the cloud with the versatility and simplicity of the PC. From contractors and interns to software developers and industrial designers, Windows 365 enables a variety of new scenarios for the new world of work.

Windows

Windows is Microsoft’s desktop operating system. The current version is Windows.

Windows Autopilot

Windows Autopilot is a collection of technologies used to set up and pre-configure new devices, getting them ready for productive use. Windows Autopilot can be used to deploy Windows PCs or HoloLens 2 devices. For more information about deploying HoloLens 2 with Autopilot, see Windows Autopilot for HoloLens 2.

Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC)

WDAC was introduced with Windows 10 and allows organizations to control which drivers and applications are allowed to run on their Windows clients. It was designed as a security feature under the servicing criteria, defined by the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). WDAC policies apply to the managed computer as a whole and affects all users of the device.

Windows Hello for Business

Windows Hello provides reliable, fully integrated biometric authentication based on facial recognition or fingerprint matching. Windows Hello uses a combination of special infrared (IR) cameras and software to increase accuracy and guard against spoofing. Major hardware vendors are shipping devices that have integrated Windows Hello-compatible cameras. Fingerprint reader hardware can be used or added to devices that don't currently have it. On devices that support Windows Hello, an easy biometric gesture unlocks users' credentials.

Word

Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft.

X

XDR (Extended Detection and Response)

Microsoft 365 Defender provides XDR capabilities for end-user environments (email, documents, identity, apps, and endpoint); and Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides XDR capabilities for infrastructure and multi-cloud platforms including virtual machines, databases, containers, and IoT.

Y

[Viva Engage](/office365/servicedescriptions/Viva Engage-service-description/Viva Engage-service-description)

Engaging your people is more critical than ever. Viva Engage connects leaders, communicators, and employees to build communities, share knowledge, and engage everyone. Viva Engage helps you connect and engage across your organization, so you can discuss ideas, share updates, and network with others.

Z

Zero-Hour Auto purge (ZAP)

In Microsoft 365 organizations with mailboxes in Exchange Online, zero-hour auto purge (ZAP) is an email protection feature that retroactively detects and neutralizes malicious phishing, spam, or malware messages that have already been delivered to Exchange Online mailboxes. ZAP doesn't work in standalone Exchange Online Protection (EOP) environments that protect on-premises Exchange mailboxes.

Zero Trust

Today’s organizations need a new security model that more effectively adapts to the complexity of the modern environment, embraces the hybrid workplace, and protects people, devices, apps, and data wherever they’re located. Zero Trust is that model.

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Additional Resources

• Common terms and definitions used in Teams Developer Documentation - While focused on Teams developers, this glossary defines most of the important components you see in Microsoft Teams.

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Principal authors:

• Marc D Anderson, MVP
• Peter Rising, MVP