1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

Active Directory: The Windows implementation of a general-purpose directory service, which uses LDAP as its primary access protocol. Active Directory stores information about a variety of objects in the network such as user accounts, computer accounts, groups, and all related credential information used by Kerberos [MS-KILE]. Active Directory is either deployed as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) or Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS), which are both described in [MS-ADOD]: Active Directory Protocols Overview.

address book: A collection of Address Book objects, each of which are contained in any number of address lists.

address book container: An Address Book object that describes an address list.

Address Book object: An entity in an address book that contains a set of attributes, each attribute with a set of associated values.

address creation template: A template that describes how to present a dialog to a messaging user along with a script describing how to construct a new email address from the user's response.

address list: A collection of distinct Address Book objects.

address type: An identifier for the type of email address, such as SMTP and EX.

alias: An alternate name that can be used to reference an object or element.

ambiguous name resolution (ANR): A search algorithm that permits a client to search multiple naming-related attributes on objects by way of a single clause of the form "(anr=value)" in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) search filter. This permits a client to query for an object when the client possesses some identifying material related to the object but does not know which attribute of the object contains that identifying material.

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character set: A character set defined by a code page approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The term "ANSI" as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference and a misnomer that persists in the Windows community. The source of this misnomer stems from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft, which became International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 8859-1 [ISO/IEC-8859-1]. In Windows, the ANSI character set can be any of the following code pages: 1252, 1250, 1251, 1253, 1254, 1255, 1256, 1257, 1258, 874, 932, 936, 949, or 950. For example, "ANSI application" is usually a reference to a non-Unicode or code-page-based application. Therefore, "ANSI character set" is often misused to refer to one of the character sets defined by a Windows code page that can be used as an active system code page; for example, character sets defined by code page 1252 or character sets defined by code page 950. Windows is now based on Unicode, so the use of ANSI character sets is strongly discouraged unless they are used to interoperate with legacy applications or legacy data.

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.

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].

departmental group: A distribution list that describes a department within an organization.

distinguished name (DN): (1) A name that uniquely identifies an object by using the relative distinguished name (RDN) for the object, and the names of container objects and domains that contain the object. The distinguished name (DN) identifies the object and its location in a tree.

(2) In X.500, the globally unique name string that identifies an entity in an X.500 directory, as described in [X500]. The DN consists of several components and is used in X.509 certificates to identify the subject and issuer principals, as described in [X509].

(3) In Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), an LDAP Distinguished Name, as described in [RFC2251] section 4.1.3. The DN of an object is the DN of its parent, preceded by the RDN of the object. For example: CN=David Thompson, OU=Users, DC=Microsoft, DC=COM. For definitions of CN and OU, see [RFC2256] sections 5.4 and 5.12, respectively.

distribution list: A collection of users, computers, contacts, or other groups that is used only for email distribution, and addressed as a single recipient.

domain: A set of users and computers sharing a common namespace and management infrastructure. At least one computer member of the set has to act as a domain controller (DC) and host a member list that identifies all members of the domain, as well as optionally hosting the Active Directory service. The domain controller provides authentication of members, creating a unit of trust for its members. Each domain has an identifier that is shared among its members. For more information, see [MS-AUTHSOD] section 1.1.1.5 and [MS-ADTS].

globally unique identifier (GUID): A term used interchangeably with universally unique identifier (UUID) in Microsoft protocol technical documents (TDs). Interchanging the usage of these terms does not imply or require a specific algorithm or mechanism to generate the value. Specifically, the use of this term does not imply or require that the algorithms described in [RFC4122] or [C706] have to be used for generating the GUID. See also universally unique identifier (UUID).

Lempel-Ziv Extended (LZX): An LZ77-based compression engine, as described in [UASDC], that is a universal lossless data compression algorithm. It performs no analysis on the data.

Lempel-Ziv Extended Delta (LZXD): A derivative of the Lempel-Ziv Extended (LZX) format with some modifications to facilitate efficient delta compression. Delta compression is a technique in which one set of data can be compressed within the context of a reference set of data that is supplied both to the compressor and decompressor. Delta compression is commonly used to encode updates to similar existing data sets so that the size of compressed data can be significantly reduced relative to ordinary non-delta compression techniques. Expanding a delta-compressed set of data requires that the exact same reference data be provided during decompression.

little-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the least significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.

locale: A collection of rules and data that are specific to a language and a geographical area. A locale can include information about sorting rules, date and time formatting, numeric and monetary conventions, and character classification.

mail tip: A note that is presented to the author of a message when the author is composing the message. A mail tip provides information about the recipients of a message and issues that might impact delivery of the message, such as moderation or delivery restrictions.

mail user: An Address Book object that represents a person or entity that can receive deliverable messages.

mailbox: A message store that contains email, calendar items, and other Message objects for a single recipient.

message store: A unit of containment for a single hierarchy of Folder objects, such as a mailbox or public folders.

name service provider interface (NSPI): A method of performing address-book-related operations on Active Directory.

OAL data sequence number: An integer that is associated with offline address list (OAL) data that represents the generation number of this data. The value of the initial sequence number is "1". Each subsequent data generation process that produces a data set that is not identical to the previous data set is incremented by one.

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE): A technology for transferring and sharing information between applications by inserting a file or part of a file into a compound document. The inserted file can be either embedded or linked. See also embedded object and linked object.

offline: The condition of not being connected to or not being on a network or the Internet. Offline can also refer to a device, such as a printer that is not connected to a computer, and files that are stored on a computer that is not connected to or not on a network or the Internet.

offline address book (OAB): A collection of address lists that are stored in a format that a client can save and use locally.

offline address list (OAL): A portion of data that is in an offline address book (OAB) and is related to a single address list.

parent distinguished name (PDN): A distinguished name (DN) (1) of an object that is the next immediate object closer to the root of a tree of relative distinguished names (RDNs).

property tag: A 32-bit value that contains a property type and a property ID. The low-order 16 bits represent the property type. The high-order 16 bits represent the property ID.

property type: A 16-bit quantity that specifies the data type of a property value.

public folder: A Folder object that is stored in a location that is publicly available.

recipient: An entity that is in an address list, can receive email messages, and contains a set of attributes. Each attribute has a set of associated values.

relative distinguished name (RDN): The name of an object relative to its parent. This is the leftmost attribute-value pair in the distinguished name (DN) of an object. For example, in the DN "cn=Peter Houston, ou=NTDEV, dc=microsoft, dc=com", the RDN is "cn=Peter Houston". For more information, see [RFC2251].

Rich Text Format (RTF): Text with formatting as described in [MSFT-RTF].

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP): A member of the TCP/IP suite of protocols that is used to transport Internet messages, as described in [RFC5321].

Unicode: A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium that represents almost all of the written languages of the world. The Unicode standard [UNICODE5.0.0/2007] provides three forms (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32) and seven schemes (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16 BE, UTF-16 LE, UTF-32, UTF-32 LE, and UTF-32 BE).

X.509: An ITU-T standard for public key infrastructure subsequently adapted by the IETF, as specified in [RFC3280].

X500 DN: A distinguished name (DN), in Teletex form, of an object that is in an address book. An X500 DN can be more limited in the size and number of relative distinguished names (RDNs) than a full DN.

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.