# Glossary

This glossary holds one definition per term in Connect's product vocabulary — workspace, Needs You, autonomy, memory, identity, relationship — and it is the only place any of them is defined. Every other page links here rather than explaining a word again, so a term means the same thing on a phone page as it does in the developer reference.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/home
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/

## The rule this page exists to enforce

A page about held email replies may say a draft is waiting in **Needs You**. It may not stop and explain what Needs You is. It links to [Needs You](/docs/glossary/needs-you/) and carries on with its own subject. The effect is that a definition changes in one place, and every page that leans on it is correct the moment it does.

The list of names is not a matter of taste. A registry of canonical terms is read by the documentation check, and a page that invents a second name for something already named fails the build. The in-app assistant is the **Connect Assistant** — not a chatbot, not an assistant bot. The decision queue is **Needs You** — not an approvals inbox. A human in a workspace's relationships is a **Person**; the address they wrote from is an **Identity**. Those are two records and two words, and this corpus never swaps one for the other.

> **Note** Some names in Connect's history are retired. A retired name is not a synonym you may use in passing — it fails the check outright, including in an aside about what a thing used to be called.

## How the vocabulary groups

The terms fall into six groups. Reading a group end to end is usually faster than reading one page, because most confusions in this glossary are between neighbours rather than between distant words.

| Group | Terms | The distinction the group turns on |
|---|---|---|
| The product | [Connect](/docs/glossary/connect/), [Digital employee](/docs/glossary/digital-employee/) | A role that works a queue, not a feature you invoke |
| The container | [Workspace](/docs/glossary/workspace/), [Owner](/docs/glossary/owner/), [Tenant](/docs/glossary/tenant/), [Customer-safe](/docs/glossary/customer-safe/) | Isolation, and which of two audiences a session belongs to |
| Work waiting | [Needs You](/docs/glossary/needs-you/), [Approval](/docs/glossary/approval/), [Follow-up](/docs/glossary/follow-up/) | A decision, a held action, and a dated commitment |
| What Connect knows | [Memory](/docs/glossary/memory/), [Knowledge](/docs/glossary/knowledge/), [Fact](/docs/glossary/fact/), [Rule](/docs/glossary/rule/), [Standing instruction](/docs/glossary/standing-instruction/) | Learned, supplied, extracted, constraining, or directed |
| Who it talks to | [Person](/docs/glossary/person/), [Identity](/docs/glossary/identity/), [Company](/docs/glossary/company/), [Relationship](/docs/glossary/relationship/) | One human, one address, one organisation, one connection |
| Permission | [Autonomy](/docs/glossary/autonomy/), [Audit](/docs/glossary/audit/), [Entitlement](/docs/glossary/entitlement/) | What may happen, what did happen, and how much is left |

## What is deliberately not defined here

Protocol and technology terms have been removed from this glossary. SIP, IMAP, OAuth, PSTN and the rest each have a page under [Technology reference](/docs/technology/) or [Protocol reference](/docs/protocols/) that explains the standard and then answers, explicitly, whether Connect uses it. A two-line glossary gloss of a protocol is the kind of writing that leaves a reader believing Connect implements something it merely speaks to, so the gloss is not offered.

Screens are not glossary entries either. Conversations, Phone and Plan & Usage are documented where they are used. A word earns a page here when it appears in prose across several sections and would otherwise be redefined in each.

## How to read an entry

**The answer** — One or two sentences that stand alone. If you only read this, you have the definition.
**In Connect** — Which screen, which record and which module the term names. This is where a general word becomes specific.
**Commonly confused with** — The neighbouring term and the consequence of mixing them up. Most support questions in this vocabulary start here.
**Related** — Where the term is actually used, including at least one page outside the glossary.

## Everything in this section

41 pages, each with its own status and the date it was last checked against the running system.

| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| [Allowance](/docs/glossary/allowance/) | An allowance is what remains of a period's permitted volume. Some are refused at the limit, some are ceilings on what may exist, and one is only counted. |
| [Approval](/docs/glossary/approval/) | An approval is one held action waiting for a human yes or no — what holds it, what the recipient sees meanwhile, and what a rejection does. |
| [Audit](/docs/glossary/audit/) | The audit trail records who did what, in what capacity, to what, and whether it worked — including the refusals, because a refusal is a decision too. |
| [Autonomy](/docs/glossary/autonomy/) | Autonomy is the per-channel rule for what Connect may do without asking: four channels, four modes, four scopes, narrowest scope wins. |
| [Carrier](/docs/glossary/carrier/) | A carrier is the telephony provider specifically — the company that reaches the public phone network, and the authority for a call's duration and cost. |
| [Channel](/docs/glossary/channel/) | A channel is a medium Connect communicates over. Four carry autonomy rules, one more exists for calls you make yourself, and the word is not the provider. |
| [Company](/docs/glossary/company/) | A company in Connect is an organisation you deal with — never your own business, which is the workspace — and it is what people are attached to. |
| [Connect](/docs/glossary/connect/) | What the name Connect covers: the product, the operator behind it, the work it does across four channels, and the names it is not. |
| [Conversation](/docs/glossary/conversation/) | A conversation is Connect's channel-agnostic unit of exchange — one continuing exchange with one person, whether it arrived by email, WhatsApp, SMS or phone. |
| [Customer 360](/docs/glossary/customer-360/) | Customer 360 is one person's whole history assembled across every channel — built when you ask for it, not stored as a separate record. |
| [Customer-safe](/docs/glossary/customer-safe/) | The allowlist that decides which API paths a customer session may call, how it differs from the rewrite that happens in the browser, and what its 403 means. |
| [Deal](/docs/glossary/deal/) | Deal is the everyday word for an opportunity. Both appear in Connect because the screens speak plainly and the model and API do not. |
| [Digital employee](/docs/glossary/digital-employee/) | The role-shaped definition of a Digital Business Employee, and the line that separates one from a task agent, a copilot or an automation. |
| [Disposition](/docs/glossary/disposition/) | A disposition is what a person decided a call was — stored apart from the engine's guess, and never overwritten by a model or a late carrier update. |
| [DNC](/docs/glossary/dnc/) | Do not contact is the strongest block a workspace can set on a person: every channel, no exceptions, and not something the Connect Assistant may clear. |
| [Entitlement](/docs/glossary/entitlement/) | An entitlement records what a workspace's subscription permits: which features it reaches and what daily volumes it may use, as two separate questions. |
| [Fact](/docs/glossary/fact/) | A fact in Connect is one grounded statement with provenance, extracted from knowledge or a conversation — and correctable on its own. |
| [Follow-up](/docs/glossary/follow-up/) | A follow-up is a dated commitment to make contact on a named channel, with the reason recorded — including one channel that never sends anything. |
| [Identity](/docs/glossary/identity/) | An identity is one address on one channel that resolves to a person — and it is not your own mailbox, not a sign-in, and never guessed. |
| [Knowledge](/docs/glossary/knowledge/) | Knowledge is the source material a workspace supplies for answers to be grounded in — what counts as a source, and why it is not the same as memory. |
| [Lead](/docs/glossary/lead/) | A lead in Connect is a contact captured from a conversation you were already having — a different record from a prospect, and from a person. |
| [Lifecycle stage](/docs/glossary/lifecycle-stage/) | A lifecycle stage says how far one relationship has got, in six words — and the transition into client is the one Connect may not make alone. |
| [Mailbox](/docs/glossary/mailbox/) | A mailbox is one email account connected to a workspace, with its own role, signature and autonomy — and it is not the same thing as an identity. |
| [Memory](/docs/glossary/memory/) | Memory in Connect is what it knows about a business and its people, held at four tiers and resolved narrowest-first — readable and erasable at each one. |
| [Needs You](/docs/glossary/needs-you/) | Needs You is the ranked queue of decisions, approvals and operational problems waiting for a person — what qualifies for it and how it empties. |
| [Opportunity](/docs/glossary/opportunity/) | An opportunity is one commercial deal on the pipeline, with a value and one of five stages — and winning it is a change only a person confirms. |
| [Outcome](/docs/glossary/outcome/) | An outcome is the engine's verdict on a call, derived from the conversation — and it decides whether anything is scheduled to happen next. |
| [Owner](/docs/glossary/owner/) | Owner in Connect means the platform operator's own workspace and session — what that changes, and the three things that are correctly operator-only. |
| [Person](/docs/glossary/person/) | A person is the canonical human record in Connect: one human however many addresses they use, and the thing every conversation resolves to. |
| [Prospect](/docs/glossary/prospect/) | A prospect is an organisation research found and kept as a candidate — held deliberately even before any contact address for it exists. |
| [Provider](/docs/glossary/provider/) | A provider is the external service behind a channel — the mail host, the messaging platform, the carrier. Connect keeps their shape out of its own records. |
| [Relationship](/docs/glossary/relationship/) | A relationship is the ongoing connection between a business and a person or company — everything that has happened, across channels and years, in one record. |
| [Rule](/docs/glossary/rule/) | A rule in Connect constrains behaviour rather than granting permission — where rules are written, and how they differ from filters and from autonomy. |
| [Standing instruction](/docs/glossary/standing-instruction/) | A standing instruction is a durable direction a person gives Connect — how it differs from a memory, from a rule and from an autonomy setting. |
| [Support case](/docs/glossary/support-case/) | A support case is one post-sale thing a customer needs sorted out, with a state and an owner — and deliberately not a helpdesk ticket. |
| [Suppression](/docs/glossary/suppression/) | Suppression is a standing block on contacting an address or number. It outranks every other reason to send, and its origin decides whether it can be lifted. |
| [Tenant](/docs/glossary/tenant/) | Tenant is the engineering word for a customer workspace: where it appears, why the product says customer instead, and what it is not. |
| [Thread](/docs/glossary/thread/) | A thread is the email-shaped conversation in Connect: what joins messages into one, what does not, and the triage state the engine reads from it. |
| [Voice Lab](/docs/glossary/voice-lab/) | Voice Lab is where a workspace tunes how Connect sounds on the phone and reviews finished calls against measurements the worker took on the wire. |
| [Workspace](/docs/glossary/workspace/) | The isolation root in Connect: what belongs to one workspace, how the boundary is enforced three times, and what deliberately sits outside it. |
| [Workspace kernel](/docs/glossary/workspace-kernel/) | The layer that filters every database query by workspace, why it is not the same thing as row-level security, and what an empty workspace stamp does to a record. |

## Questions

### Why does the same word sometimes appear in the product and in engineering with different weight?

Because two audiences read the corpus. *Tenant* is the engineering word for a customer workspace and appears in route names and isolation code; *customer* is the same thing in prose a business owner reads. Both are defined, and the entry for each says which register it belongs to.

### If a page contradicts this glossary, which is right?

The glossary. A definition lives in exactly one place so that a contradiction is a bug in the other page rather than an open question, and the documentation check is what catches most of them before publication.

### Can I use a term from here in an integration without checking anything else?

For prose, yes. For field names, no — the API has its own identifiers and its own stability rules, and [the public data model](/developers/data-model-public/) is the authority for those.

## Related

- [Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/connect/)
- [Workspace](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/workspace/)
- [Connect by JBRH](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/product/)
- [Technology reference](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/technology/)
- [The public data model](https://connectbyjbrh.com/developers/data-model-public/)

## What this page is based on

- `docs-source/facts.py` — CANONICAL_TERMS and RETIRED_TERMS
- AGENTS.md §12 (via docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md) — house style
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)