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Glossary
Not the textbook definition — the one that decides whether a migration slips, an invoice carries VAT, or a rollout gets stopped by a works council. Each entry links to where it comes up on this site. For the facts about the company itself, see the page for AI agents and researchers.
A Microsoft 365 tenant is the single instance of Microsoft 365 that belongs to one organisation: its users, mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Teams, policies and licences, all under one Entra ID directory. Two companies that merge do not merge their tenants automatically; that is a project. There is no merge button.
Where it comes up →Bringing two or more Microsoft 365 tenants together after a merger or acquisition, or splitting one out on a divestiture. Every consolidation decomposes into a sequence of workload moves, each with its own tooling and limits.
Where it comes up →Moving mailboxes, files, Teams and identities from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another. Usually triggered by an acquisition, a divestiture, a rebrand or a relocation. Concurrency limits, not bandwidth, set the schedule.
Where it comes up →Splitting a division or subsidiary out of a group tenant into a clean tenant of its own, typically before a sale. The same discipline as consolidation, run in reverse, and usually against a transitional service agreement deadline.
Where it comes up →A contract under which a seller keeps providing IT and other services to a divested business for a fixed period after the deal closes. The expiry date is a legal deadline for the carve-out, which is why the migration plan is built backwards from it.
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s partner-led programme for selling Microsoft 365 and Azure subscriptions. The partner invoices the customer and provides support. The programme is regional: a partner authorised in one region can sell only into that region’s country list.
Where it comes up →Microsoft divides the world into regions for the CSP programme, each with a fixed country list. A partner’s authorisation is per region, which is why most resellers can invoice in exactly one country. Eligibility follows the country set in the customer’s tenant, not the location of their office.
Where it comes up →The Cloud Solution Provider associated with a customer’s subscriptions in Microsoft’s systems. Changing it does not migrate anything and causes no downtime; the customer accepts a change request and subscriptions transfer at renewal points.
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s direct volume licensing contract, historically for 500 seats or more, running three years with an annual true-up. Suits large, stable organisations; loses to CSP where headcount is uncertain or spread across countries.
Where it comes up →The current commercial framework for CSP subscriptions. It introduced fixed commitment terms: monthly with no commitment, one-year, or three-year, with annual terms cancellable only within a short window after purchase. Terms are set per subscription, not per tenant.
Where it comes up →How long a subscription is committed for under NCE. A one-year commitment paid annually is priced roughly a fifth below monthly with no commitment. Seats can be added at any time on an annual term but reduced only at renewal; monthly seats can be reduced each month.
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s published list price for a subscription, per region and currency. Partners buy below it and sell at or below it. The list price on this site is the ERP for the Europe region; a partner’s price to a customer is lower and depends on volume and term.
Where it comes up →Following a European competition case, Microsoft sells most Microsoft 365 and Office 365 bundles in the EEA in two forms: with Teams, and without it at a lower price. Existing customers were not migrated automatically. On Business Premium the difference is roughly 15 percent.
Where it comes up →The public identifier for a Microsoft partner organisation. Each has a profile on Microsoft Partner Finder, published by Microsoft rather than the partner. IT Partner holds six: 6213886 (Europe), 6714075 (UAE), 4939031 (Australia), 6088085 (Canada), 4100178 (United States), and 6905999 (Hong Kong, Asia and Pacific).
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s current partner qualification, replacing the old Gold and Silver competencies. There are six: Security, Modern Work, Infrastructure, Digital & App Innovation, Data & AI, and Business Applications. IT Partner holds four of six.
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s cloud identity service, formerly Azure Active Directory. Every Microsoft 365 tenant has one. It holds users, groups and sign-in policy, and is the thing that Conditional Access and Intune are built on.
Where it comes up →The synchronisation service that copies identities from an on-premises Active Directory into Entra ID. A tenant syncing from an on-premises directory is a different migration from a cloud-only one. Usually the last thing retired in an on-premises to cloud move, not the first.
Where it comes up →Entra ID policy that decides whether a sign-in is allowed based on user, device, location and risk. Policies are tenant configuration: they do not migrate and must be rebuilt in the target. Applied before enrolment, they lock people out.
Where it comes up →An emergency administrator account excluded from Conditional Access and multi-factor authentication, with credentials stored where a locked-out administrator can reach them. Not optional in any Conditional Access rollout.
Where it comes up →Microsoft’s device and application management service: enrolment, compliance policy, application deployment, remote wipe. Included in Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and F3; not in Office 365 E3 or E5. In Germany it falls under works council co-determination.
Where it comes up →Under §87(1) No. 6 of the German Works Constitution Act, a works council has co-determination rights over technical systems capable of monitoring employee behaviour or performance. Intune, Conditional Access and Defender for Endpoint qualify. This is agreement, not consultation.
Where it comes up →A setting that preserves a mailbox’s contents indefinitely, including items the user deletes, for legal discovery. A mailbox under hold keeps its contents after the licence is removed and becomes an inactive mailbox. Holds are tenant configuration and are recreated in a target tenant, not migrated.
Where it comes up →A mailbox whose licence has been removed while a hold was in place. It disappears from the address book, costs nothing, and remains searchable through eDiscovery for as long as the hold lasts. Remove the licence without a hold and the mailbox is deleted after the grace period.
Where it comes up →A group of mailboxes moved together. Batches run a limited number of mailboxes concurrently — around twenty in practice — so a thousand users is fifty passes through the queue regardless of budget.
Where it comes up →Microsoft deliberately slowing migration traffic to protect the service for other tenants. There is no error; things run slower than the same job ran last week. It cannot be negotiated away, only planned around.
Where it comes up →The period during a migration when two tenants are both live and people on each need to see the other’s calendars and receive their mail. Designed before the first wave runs, not discovered during it.
Where it comes up →The moment a domain, mail flow or identity switches from the source to the target tenant. A custom domain can be attached to only one tenant at a time, so this is a scheduled event, usually a weekend, rather than a gradual transition.
Where it comes up →A final incremental migration run after cutover to pick up anything that arrived in the source during the window. Without it, the last day’s mail is lost.
Where it comes up →A defined point in a migration wave where the team decides, against pre-agreed criteria, whether to proceed or revert. Written into the plan before the wave runs, so nobody is improvising at 2am.
Where it comes up →Matching each user’s licence to what they actually use rather than what they were assigned. The commonest finding of a licensing review: E5 features switched off, Business Premium on people who read email on a phone, seats still assigned to people who have left.
Where it comes up →The VAT mechanism for business-to-business services across EU borders and to the UK: the invoice carries no VAT and the customer accounts for it locally. Why an invoice from IT Partner’s Estonian entity to a German or British business shows none.
Where it comes up →Missing a term?
This list grows from the questions people ask on first calls. If a term you needed is not defined, write to us — you get the answer, and the next reader gets the entry.