Glossary

Microsoft Entra ID

Entra ID is Microsoft's identity service, formerly Azure Active Directory. It holds your users, groups and applications, issues the tokens that prove who someone is, and is where application permissions are consented to.

It is also the directory an employee directory should usually read from: leavers disappear automatically because the account is disabled, with no maintenance from you.

The rename matters when reading documentation. Anything written before 2023 calls it Azure AD, and plenty of tooling and error messages still do.

Read more about this

Building an employee directory in SharePointBefore building anything, check what Microsoft already gives you — the People web part reads Entra ID for free. When that is not enough, three routes to a real directory with photos, teams and search, and the permission question nobody asks first.
SharePoint API access requests: what you are actually approvingThe API access page in the SharePoint admin center shows pending permission requests from deployed packages. How to read one, the difference between delegated and application permissions, which scopes should make you stop, and how to revoke access afterwards.

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