Glossary

The one that trips people up

An add-in is what you create. An agent is what runs it.

You create an add-in in the dashboard: one thing to install in Excel, one formula namespace, one taskpane. That add-in is split into environments, and each environment is served by its own agent — the connxl-agent process running on your infrastructure. One agent per environment; an agent can run as several replicas behind a load balancer.

So "add-in" is a thing you configure, and "agent" is a thing that runs. They are never interchangeable.

Terms

Add-in — the top-level thing you create. One Microsoft 365 admin center entry, one formula namespace, one taskpane. Owned by an organization.

Agent — the connxl-agent binary running on your own host. Serves the add-in's taskpane and custom functions to Excel, and executes functions against your data sources. One per environment.

Replica — one running copy of an agent. Several replicas share an environment's certificate and configuration, so you can scale out or roll without downtime.

Organization — your tenant. Owns add-ins, members, billing and notification channels.

Environment — a named stage within an add-in (up to five). Development, Staging, Production, whatever you name them.

Source environment — the lowest environment, where structure is created and edited. The only place you can add functions, connections, ribbon buttons or taskpane blocks.

Downstream environment — every environment above the source. Structure arrives only by promotion; there you edit environment-specific values (credentials, hosts, cache) and nothing else.

Promote — copy the source environment's structure into a downstream environment, preserving that environment's own credentials and values.

Publish — make an environment's saved configuration the one its agent actually serves. Editing is not publishing; the dashboard shows an "unpublished changes" marker until you do.

Connection — a pointer to one of your data sources, with credentials held as secret:// references your agent resolves locally. Credential values never reach ConnXL.

Function — the mapping from a connection to a formula your users type, e.g. =CONNXL.SALES.TOPCUSTOMERS("2026-Q1").

Namespace — the first token of every formula the add-in serves. Defaults to CONNXL, chosen per add-in when you create it, and immutable afterwards.

Resource — anything an environment serves to Excel beyond a plain function: grid views, charts, named ranges, conditional formats, data validations, protections, comments, image inserts, events, dialogs, ribbon buttons and the taskpane.

Taskpane — the side panel your users work in, designed block-by-block in the dashboard rather than coded.

Enrollment token — a one-time secret an agent exchanges at first boot for the mTLS client certificate that authenticates it from then on. Scoped to one environment.

Snapshot — the full configuration bundle an agent pulls from ConnXL and serves from memory. Agents re-pull when their environment's config version moves.

Config version — the per-environment counter that increments on every published change. It is how an agent knows it is behind.

Entitlement lease — the signed proof of your subscription that rides along with the agent's heartbeat, verified offline so a brief loss of connectivity never stops Excel working.