SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

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Business Connectivity Services

By Reza Alirezaei

As much as SharePoint architects love to think of SharePoint as the only platform on top of which their applications can be built, in reality, SharePoint is not — and it won't be — the only option!

In today's world, enterprises operate in a hybrid model, where different platforms are used to implement business processes that they need to carry on with their business. Business processes often use different protocols and data that may span multiple structured or unstructured systems. The challenging part is always the increasing demand to integrate and share information between those systems.

This chapter gives you an architectural overview of Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. It also covers how to use this technology to address integration challenges, and think of it as a data access layer to design and build robust and flexible applications.

INTRODUCING BUSINESS CONNECTIVITY SERVICES

As part of its composites workload, SharePoint 2010 includes a comprehensive set of presentation features, a connectivity framework, and tooling experience that provide an easy way to integrate SharePoint with various back-end systems across your organization. SharePoint 2010 brings all this new functionality under the umbrella of an enabling technology, called Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

If you have ever designed a solution based on Business Data Catalog (BDC) in Microsoft Office SharePoint ...