Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)

Although the acronym "OLE" has come to mean in-place activation, it originally stood for Object Linking and Embedding, a distributed object system and protocol from Microsoft. OLE allows an application to "farm out" part of a document to another application and then bring that part back in to the original application with any alterations included. For example, the TinyTERM Emulator uses OLE to enable connections through URLs.