In his newsletter, Lucas Wensing generously put together a glossary of SharePoint terms targeted at business users. The glossary in the product help files is usually a bit technical for your average business user. Enjoy.

• Area A location in a SharePoint portal where users view and edit Web Parts Page(s), set up lists and libraries, and store and display area listings.
• Audience A group of users determined based on rules configured by a portal administrator. For example, new employees, executives, salespeople, or people from California could potentially be set up as audiences. The audience rules can be based on information in the user profile, by membership in an Active Directory security group or an Exchange distribution list, or based on the organization’s reporting structure (if this is kept in Active Directory)
• Library A specialized list that can hold documents, forms or pictures. A document library can hold any kind of document, or even Web Parts Pages. A forms library can hold InfoPath forms, and manage their submission to a back-end system. A picture library holds image files and will display them as thumbnails.
• List A table of data stored in an area or site. Lists are used to provide contacts, links, tasks, threaded discussions, and other collaboration features in SharePoint. Custom lists can be created by business users if they have sufficient permission.
• Listing Listings are stored and displayed in Areas to cross-reference information in a SharePoint portal. Each listing is reference to a piece of content which may be within an Area or on any reachable web site. Listings have a name and the URL where the referenced content can be found, along with an optional description and picture.
• My Site A personal web location provided by SharePoint Portal Server. Each My Site has a public and a private view. The private view provides personal lists, libraries and web parts pages which a user can set up to manage his or her work. Users can create sites within their my site for publishing or collaborating with other users. The public view displays the user profile to other users, and allows each user to edit his or her own user profile.
• Portal Generally speaking, a portal is a unified web presence that connects people to contextually relevant information, services and applications. In SharePoint, this consists of a collection of areas, enterprise search features, user profiling and audience targeting, comprising a web presence for an enterprise. SharePoint Portal Server can create one or more portals on web servers where it is installed.
• Search A feature provided by SharePoint Portal Server which allows free-text and metadata searching of:
  • Content in SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Server, including lists, documents in libraries, and user profiles
  • Content in Microsoft Exchange public folders
  • Content in Lotus Notes databases
  • Content in shared file systems
  • Content in external web sites, including sites managed with Microsoft Content Management Server or any other hosting tool
• SharePoint Portal Server An advanced application built on Windows SharePoint Services, SPS provides:
  • Portals
  • Areas, listings and an enterprise navigation scheme to organize content and sections within the portal
  • Search across unstructured and structured information in the enterprise
  • User Profiles and audiences to provide targeting and encourage collaboration
  • My Sites for personalized storage and web parts pages by individual users
• Site A location in Windows SharePoint Services where users can share data in lists and libraries, and can view and edit one or more web parts pages. Sites are generally used for collaboration, but can also be used to host content.Without an additional tool such as SharePoint Portal Server, each site is an island – i.e. there is no built-in navigation among sites.Also see workspace and site collection.
• Site Collection A site in Windows SharePoint Services that is at the “top level” (i.e. it is not the child of another site). A site collection maintains certain information, such as the site templates and web part gallery entries for all the sites within the collection. A site collection does not provide navigation to the sites within it, but does provide these global settings. Site collections can be useful in allowing parts of the business to control a consistent set of sites which are hosted beneath them.
• Site Template When a site has been set up with a particular set of web parts, lists, libraries and other customizations, it can be saved as a template for re-use. For example, a customer could modify the default meeting workspace for use in video conferencing, and then save the result as a site template. Then other users would be given the choice to create the video conference workspace when creating a new site.
• User Profile An object in SharePoint Portal Server which represents a user. Each user profile contains information about one user, and can be listed, searched and displayed by other users in an organization. Information in user profiles can be imported from Active Directory or input by the users themselves, or both.
• Web Part A re-usable, rectangular display area displayed on a web parts page. Web Parts are organized into Web Part Galleries, and can usually be configured by a business user to change the way they display themselves.Typically, web parts are used to display:
  • Data from lists and libraries
  • Area listings
  • Information from external systems, such as data warehouses, back-end line of business applications or other web sites
  • Information from third parties, such as news feeds and research tools
• Web Part Gallery Within a site or area, web parts that are not currently placed on a web parts page are stored in web part galleries. These include:
  • Web Part Page Gallery – holds web parts which were on the page but are currently closed
  • Area or Site Gallery – holds web parts which are supplied automatically to display content within an area or siteVirtual Server
  • Gallery – holds web parts which have been installed for global use in a SharePoint installation
  • Online Gallery – holds web parts which retrieve online information
• Web Part Zone Web parts are arranged in zones. This controls where the web parts can be arranged on a web parts page, whether they will be arranged horizontally or vertically, and whether they will be seen by everyone (“shared” web parts) or by individual users (“personal” web parts).
• Web Parts Page A web page which can host one or more web parts. One or more web part zones are generally present on the page to allow web parts to be manipulated on the page.
• Windows SharePoint Services The basis for SharePoint technologies, WSS provides core features such as lists, libraries, web parts and web part pages. WSS provides simple sites but does not attempt to organize them into a larger web presence or portal.
• Workspace A specialized site for collaborating in a particular way. By default, Windows SharePoint Services provides for Document Workspaces, which are designed for collaborating on documents, and Meeting Workspaces, which are designed for organizing meetings.