1.1 Glossary

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This document uses the following terms:

ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an 8-bit character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. ASCII refers to a single 8-bit ASCII character or an array of 8-bit ASCII characters with the high bit of each character set to zero.

atomic transaction: A shared activity that provides mechanisms for achieving the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) properties when state changes occur inside participating resource managers.

Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF): A modified version of Backus-Naur Form (BNF), commonly used by Internet specifications. ABNF notation balances compactness and simplicity with reasonable representational power. ABNF differs from standard BNF in its definitions and uses of naming rules, repetition, alternatives, order-independence, and value ranges. For more information, see [RFC5234].

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD): The identity service in Microsoft Azure that provides identity management and access control capabilities through a REST-based API, an Azure portal, or a PowerShell command window.

base64 encoding: A binary-to-text encoding scheme whereby an arbitrary sequence of bytes is converted to a sequence of printable ASCII characters, as described in [RFC4648].

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC): A high-precision atomic time standard that approximately tracks Universal Time (UT). It is the basis for legal, civil time all over the Earth. Time zones around the world are expressed as positive and negative offsets from UTC. In this role, it is also referred to as Zulu time (Z) and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). In these specifications, all references to UTC refer to the time at UTC-0 (or GMT).

file extension: The sequence of characters in a file's name between the end of the file's name and the last "." character. Vendors of applications choose such sequences for the applications to uniquely identify files that were created by those applications. This allows file management software to determine which application are to be used to open a file.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): An application of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that uses tags to mark elements in a document, as described in [HTML].

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): An application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems (text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files) on the World Wide Web.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS): An extension of HTTP that securely encrypts and decrypts web page requests. In some older protocols, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Sockets Layer" is still used (Secure Sockets Layer has been deprecated). For more information, see [SSL3] and [RFC5246].

Information Rights Management (IRM): A technology that provides persistent protection to digital data by using encryption, certificates, and authentication. Authorized recipients or users acquire a license to gain access to the protected files according to the rights or business rules that are set by the content owner.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA): A central repository for the protocol name and number registries that are used in many Internet protocols.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON): A text-based, data interchange format that is used to transmit structured data, typically in Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (AJAX) web applications, as described in [RFC7159]. The JSON format is based on the structure of ECMAScript (Jscript, JavaScript) objects.

Representational State Transfer (REST): A software architecture implementation for distributed hypermedia systems, such as the World Wide Web.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): A security protocol that supports confidentiality and integrity of messages in client and server applications that communicate over open networks. SSL supports server and, optionally, client authentication using X.509 certificates [X509] and [RFC5280]. SSL is superseded by Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS version 1.0 is based on SSL version 3.0 [SSL3].

tenant: A protocol client or protocol server that accesses a partition in a shared service database.

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): A string that identifies a resource. The URI is an addressing mechanism defined in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax [RFC3986].

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): A string of characters in a standardized format that identifies a document or resource on the World Wide Web. The format is as specified in [RFC1738].

universally unique identifier (UUID): A 128-bit value. UUIDs can be used for multiple purposes, from tagging objects with an extremely short lifetime, to reliably identifying very persistent objects in cross-process communication such as client and server interfaces, manager entry-point vectors, and RPC objects. UUIDs are highly likely to be unique. UUIDs are also known as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) and these terms are used interchangeably in the Microsoft protocol technical documents (TDs). Interchanging the usage of these terms does not imply or require a specific algorithm or mechanism to generate the UUID. Specifically, the use of this term does not imply or require that the algorithms described in [RFC4122] or [C706] must be used for generating the UUID.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.