Microsoft 365 A to Z

Welcome to this little list. My intention in producing this page is to provide an easily accessible guide list for everything within Microsoft 365. Here we will cover services, technologies, and principles relating to the Microsoft 365 platform throughout the alphabet from Azure Active Directory right through to Zero-Trust. As Microsoft 365 is ever changing and ever growing – I expect this list will be a permanent work in progress, and because of this I will be welcoming suggestions for additions, corrections, and things I may have missed as the list grows and develops. OK, so let’s get into the list!

A

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

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.

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 365 compliance center 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.

Audit Log – Use the audit log search tool in Microsoft 365 compliance center to search the unified audit log to view user and administrator activity in your organization.

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

Azure Active Directory (AAD) – Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service which helps employees to sign in and access resources.

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

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

Azure Information Protection (AIP) – A cloud-based solution that enables organizations to discover, classify, and protect documents and emails by applying labels to content.

B

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

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.

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.

C

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

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

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 365 compliance center provides easy access to the data and tools you need to manage to your organization’s compliance needs.

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

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 365 Compliance center.

Content Search – Use the Content search tool in the Microsoft 365 compliance center 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Yammer.

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

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 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.

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.

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 Azure AD account using a FIDO2 security key.

File Plan – Although you can create and manage retention labels from Information governance in the Microsoft 365 compliance center, file plan from Records management has additional management capabilities.

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.

Governance – Microsoft Information Governance (MIG) provides capabilities to govern your data for compliance or regulatory requirements.

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 Azure Active Directory, as well as services that use Azure Active Directory identities like the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, the Microsoft 365 compliance center, 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.

Graph API – The Microsoft Graph API offers a single endpoint, https://graph.microsoft.com, 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.

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.

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.

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 Webpart – Use the Highlighted Content web part in SharePoint to dynamically display content (documents, pages, news, videos, images, etc.) from a document library, a site, a set of sites, a site collection, or all sites.

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

Hub Sites – Hub Sites help you organize your intranet. SharePoint hub sites provide an important building block for your intranet. They’re the "connective tissue" you use when organizing families of team sites and communication sites together.

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.