Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

12.1. Business Data Catalog Overview

Increasingly, organizations are under pressure to become more efficient, and part of this is enabling employees to make accelerated and accurate decisions based on business data. Complex schedules and initiatives require that workers spend less time looking for information and more time using it to effectively perform and complete tasks.

So far in this book, you've seen the various ways to input information into SharePoint and make it available to others. A business may have its information stored in places like SharePoint and file shares, as well as in business applications or databases. This data is very tightly tied to the business' core operations and can offer the greatest insight into an organization's true fiscal health. Therefore, a good way to improve a business process is to start with how it accesses its information and what business applications it uses to do this. This section discusses what the Business Data Catalog is and what some of the key roles related to its use and configuration are.

12.1.1. What Is the Business Data Catalog?

The BDC is a new shared service that enables users to access data from back-end business applications on their SharePoint sites via Web Parts, lists, search, or as part of their user profiles. While the BDC does not store the data directly, it defines business applications and supports the access of the content in real time via web services or database connections. In some cases, the BDC may feature ...