Microsoft® Access® 2010 Inside Out

Introducing Business Connectivity Services

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft introduced a mechanism, called the Business Data Catalog (BDC), for utilizing back-end data sources in SharePoint applications. In SharePoint 2007, you could connect to data through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) connections, Web Services, and SQL Server databases. The data connections in SharePoint 2007, however, were read-only, and you could communicate to protocols only through protocol shims that were developed by and shipped with the BDC. You can think of a protocol as a description of formats and rules for exchanging electronic messages and a protocol shim as a means for the BDC to talk different protocols.

With the SharePoint 2010 release, ...