How does it work, MSMQ Edition.

Motley Queüe - MSMQ's Major Moving Parts, part one

"In MSMQ, there are two important kinds of entities. As you might expect, they are messages and queues.

To MSMQ, a message is a bundle of properties. The thing you normally think of as being the message, the actual content, is one of those properties, known as the body. A survey of message properties would be an entire post by itself, so I'm going to leave that for later. Every message in the system is required to be associated with ("in") a queue.

..."

I've been asked by non-tech's/developers in the past, "Just what IS MSMQ?"

Which of course I respond with, "Um... It's a Queue Manager... thing... that hosts messages... which get routed... to... queues... thing..." 

(Actually I respond with a deck of cards metaphor. That a MSMQ queue is like a stack of playing cards, with each card having its own value and applications always pulling one card from the top of the deck, yada, yada, yada...)

The above post does a great job IMHO of using non-uber technical terms to describe MSMQ's moving parts.