Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Identifying Your Business Data

The first step to successfully implementing a business data application is to define what the data is and in what scenario it can be leveraged in SharePoint. This allows you to define the success criteria and goals for your business application that can be used to guide your application definition and implementation.

Identifying data sources

The BDC functionality is primarily designed to integrate the line-of-business (LOB) applications in your organization. LOB applications are the critical applications at the heart of running an enterprise. At the line-of-business application level, there are several common types of data sources, including:

• Accounting: An LOB application that contains all of your invoicing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll, and expense information.

• Supply chain management: An application that tracks the data through all the phases from design to distribution of a manufacturing process. This includes inventory management and order fulfillment processes.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A CRM application that tracks all of your customers and interactions with customers. This can be a very complex set of data if your business is centered on customer interactions like a call center, or simple data if the CRM is just tracking the actions for a couple of salespeople.

• Human Resource: A human resource application that focuses on tracking all the information on current and previous employees. This data is typically very ...