The jargon, in plain words
Glossary
The words you hear as soon as Microsoft 365, Power Platform or AI agents come up, explained in a few sentences with no jargon. Each definition links to a service or a delivered project, so you can see what it means in practice.
A
- AI agent
- An assistant that does more than answer: it reads, sorts, summarizes and acts on a specific task, for example reading an invoice received by email and matching it to the purchase order. It only works with the documents and tools it has been given access to. Well designed, it prepares the decisions that commit the company and leaves them to a person.
- See also:
- Approval workflow
- The path a request follows before it is accepted: who approves, in what order and within what time. Once automated, it sends the request to the right person, follows up when nothing moves and keeps a history of every decision. Nobody has to chase where a file stands anymore.
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- Automation
- Handing a repetitive manual task over to an automatic process: reminders, file imports, copying data from one tool to another, sending documents. A good automation leaves a visible trail: what ran, when, and what failed.
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B
- Business application
- An application built for a specific use in the company: purchase requests, case tracking, approvals, field inspections. It replaces the shared Excel file and the email back-and-forth with a single, up-to-date tool where everyone sees what concerns them. It opens on a computer, a tablet or a phone.
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C
- Connector
- The link that lets an application or an automation read and write in another service: Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, a business system, a database. Microsoft offers more than a thousand of them, ready to use. Standard connectors are included in business Microsoft 365 subscriptions; Premium connectors require an extra license.
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- Copilot
- The name of Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel. It drafts, summarizes and answers based on the documents the user can already access, with their permissions. Agents can be added to it, each one specialized in a task of the company.
- See also:
- Copilot Studio
- Microsoft's tool for building AI agents: you describe what the agent should do, connect it to the company's sources (shared folders, sites, databases) and publish it in Teams, on a website or in Copilot. It can also act, for example by creating a request or sending an email, according to rules written in advance.
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D
- Data in your environment (GDPR)
- An application or an agent built in your Microsoft 365 environment keeps the data in that space, under your access rules, instead of copying it to an outside service. It supports GDPR compliance, which requires knowing where personal data is, who sees it and why. Compliance remains the company's responsibility: the tool makes it easier, it does not replace it.
- See also:
- Dataverse
- The Power Platform database, designed for business applications: well-organized tables, role-based permissions, a history of changes. It takes over when an Excel file or a SharePoint list is no longer enough, because of volume, security or the links between data. Outside Teams, it usually requires a Premium license.
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F
- Flow
- In Power Automate, a series of steps that run on their own from a trigger: an email received, a form submitted, a set time. Every run is logged, so you can tell what ran and track down an error. A well-built flow alerts someone when it fails.
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G
- Governance
- The rules that keep a company's applications and automations healthy over time: who can build what, with which data, and who maintains them. Without governance, tools multiply with no owner; with it, everyone knows what exists and who is responsible for it.
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M
- Microsoft 365
- Microsoft's subscription that brings together Outlook email, Teams, Word, Excel and the SharePoint and OneDrive shared folders. Most business subscriptions also include Power Apps and Power Automate, to build applications and automate tasks. A company that pays for Microsoft 365 often already has what it needs to build its own tools.
- See also:
- Microsoft 365 environment
- The space Microsoft reserves for your company: your accounts, mailboxes, shared folders, Teams and applications. It is kept separate from other companies' spaces, and your IT department sets its access rules. When we say your data stays with you, this is the space we mean.
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P
- Power Apps
- Microsoft's tool for building business applications without starting from scratch: forms, approvals, tracking tables, on computer, tablet and phone. The applications live in your Microsoft 365 environment and respect your access rights. It is often the tool that replaces a shared Excel file.
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- Power Automate
- Microsoft's tool for running automatic tasks: sending an email, copying data, requesting an approval, producing a PDF. Each automation is a flow, started by an event (an email received, a file dropped) or at a set time.
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- Power Platform
- Microsoft's family of tools for building applications (Power Apps), automating tasks (Power Automate), creating AI agents (Copilot Studio) and analyzing figures (Power BI). These tools share the same connectors and the same database, Dataverse, and rely on Microsoft 365 accounts and permissions.
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- Process audit
- A study of a process as it is really carried out: who does what, how long it takes, where errors and retyping come from. It ends with a figure, what the process costs today, an estimate of the gain and a written scope. It is the basis for deciding to launch a project, or to drop it.
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S
T
- Teams
- Microsoft 365 messaging, meetings and teams. An application or an automation can send a notification, an approval request or a reply there, where teams already work. Nobody needs to open yet another tool to be notified.
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A process that costs you too much? An Excel file that has outgrown itself? A team losing time?
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