Chapter 15. Business Connectivity Services
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
How to configure a BCS Application
How to use BCS with SharePoint 2010
How to work with BCS as a SharePoint administrator
How to develop custom solutions for BCS
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is all about using SharePoint to connect the isolated silos of data in your company. What kind of data exists in any given organization? There are payroll and personnel systems, patient databases in healthcare, customer and vendor databases, and sales and inventory systems. The list goes on and on. These different types of databases can be seen as separate islands of information, but with SharePoint 2010 and the BCS, they can all be brought into one interface. External content types (ECTs) are new in SharePoint 2010, and they allow for the exposure of data from external systems, such as databases and Web Services, into SharePoint. There is a new type of list called an external list, which has the appearance of a regular SharePoint list, but is really a web interface directly to the external data. Compared to the read-only nature of the SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog, the new BCS not only allows viewing of the external data, but also provides the ability to insert, update, and delete data. All of this can be done out-of-box, in an easy user interface, without having to write any custom code! Figure 15-1 shows a high-level diagram of BCS, featuring some ways that SharePoint interfaces with external data sources. ...
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