Forum Discussion
Request for Advice on Managing Shared Glossary Terms in Microsoft Purview
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for guidance from others who are working with Microsoft Purview (Unified Catalog), especially around glossary and governance domain design.
Scenario; I have multiple governance domains, all within the same Purview tenant. We have some core business concepts from the conceptual data models for example, a term like “PARTY” that are needed in every governance domain.
However, based on Microsoft’s documentation:
- Glossary terms can only be created inside a specific governance domain, not at a tenant‑wide or global level.
- The Enterprise Glossary is only a consolidated view, not a place to create global terms or maintain a single shared version. It simply displays all terms from all domains in one list.
- If the same term is needed across domains, Purview requires separate term objects in each domain.
- Consistency must therefore be managed manually (by re‑creating the term in each domain) or by importing/exporting via CSV or automation (API/PyApacheAtlas)?
This leads to questions about maintainability; especially when we want one consistent definition across all domains.
What I'm hoping to understand from others:
- How are you handling shared enterprise concepts – enterprise and conceptual data models that need to appear in multiple governance domains?
- Are you duplicating terms in each domain and synchronising them manually or via automation?
- Have you adopted a “central domain” for hosting enterprise‑standard terms and then linking or referencing them in other domains?
- Is there any better pattern you’ve found to avoid fragmentation and to ensure consistent definitions across domains?
Any advice, lessons learned, or examples of how you’ve structured glossary governance in Purview would be really helpful.
this is be a primary ORKS - Establish a unified method to consistently link individual entities (e.g., PARTY) to their associated PII‑classified column‑level data assets in Microsoft Purview, ensuring sensitive data is accurately identified, governed, and monitored across all domains. – I.e CDE to Glossary terms
Thanks in advance!
1 Reply
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.
