Best Practices for using the business glossary in Microsoft Purview

There are many terms that are used within a business and for business to function well it is important to have common terms. There are a few things to think about:

Preparation Standards

• Create a hierarchy of business terms
• Have a naming standard for the glossary. Terms are case sensitive in Purview and allow white space
• Check for Duplicate terms
• Avoid duplicate term names in different parent terms

Term Templates

Using the term template sample.csv file is recommended when importing terms, although a custom template may be used.

Terms updated that already existed will be over written during import, so it is best to test this in a lab environment.

Steward and Experts need to use their Azure Active Directory emails.

Disaster recovery should be considered and exporting the glossary terms could be useful for that.

Multiple Business Glossaries

Multiple business glossaries in Microsoft Purview  were introduced  in December 2022. You can read the article here: Microsoft Purview now supports multiple business glossaries

There are some advantages to this practice.

• To enable different parts of the business to manage the terms with ease
• Where different parts of the business have different needs for a glossary

Glossary terms are not automatically applied to assets. They can be added manually, by bulk edit mode, for up to 25 terms,  or curated code using the Atlas API.

There are various glossary term status:

• Draft – not officially implemented
• Approved – current term
• Expired – no longer used
• Alert – required attention

More details about best practice can be found here