SharePoint 2010 For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 29

Business Connectivity Services

In This Chapter

Determining what data you want to show in SharePoint

Creating a new external content type

Creating a list based on the external data

Using the external data as a lookup

In the previous version of SharePoint, the Business Data Catalog was a one-way street that allowed you to get data from external line of business (LOB) systems into SharePoint. The process was complicated to set up and, more importantly, didn’t allow you to update data in the external system from SharePoint. With Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010, both of these drawbacks are solved, although setting up more sophisticated connections to external data is still complicated — more on that later.

BCS also allows SharePoint to index and search external data, and, depending on the version of SharePoint 2010 you’ve licensed, bring that data into Office applications such as Outlook.

Planning for Business Connectivity Services

Here are several things to consider when planning for BCS:

What is the data you want to bring into SharePoint?

Where is ...