Request for Advice on Managing Shared Glossary Terms in Microsoft Purview

In our experience, this is mainly a governance and modeling decision, not a Purview feature gap.

Purview glossary terms are scoped to governance domains, so there is no native way to define an enterprise concept once and reuse it across multiple domains. If you split too aggressively into governance domains, this quickly leads to duplication of enterprise and conceptual terms, with consistency needing to be managed manually or via automation.

Because of that, we first challenge whether governance domains are really the right level of separation. If the primary goal is organization, visibility, or logical grouping rather than different governance rules, using collections within a single governance domain is often a better approach. This allows enterprise concepts to be defined once, while still providing enough structure to organize assets.

Only where domains are truly required for different governance ownership or policies do we accept duplication as a trade-off.

In short, reducing fragmentation starts with keeping governance domains coarse-grained and using collections where possible, rather than trying to centrally synchronize glossary terms across domains.