SharePoint Tip of the Month

March 2010: Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is SharePoint 2010’s rebranded version of the Business Data Catalog. In SharePoint 2007, the Business Data Catalog introduced functionality that allowed business users to consume, in SharePoint, content from their external-to-SharePoint data repositories. SharePoint lists could contain fields that joined them to corporate databases, allowing for sorting, filtering and views. Additionally, a series of web parts were available to display individual and lists of database records directly in SharePoint. To the end user, the content looked like it lived in SharePoint. In reality, the data continued to live in the company’s existing business systems.

BCS in SharePoint 2010 builds upon these capabilities in three new ways:

1. Components have been added to Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 to easily create BCS components. In 2007, connecting to third-party databases required either writing 2000-line XML files by hand, or purchasing 3rd party tools. With 2010, leveraging the same applications that you use for other SharePoint design and development activities eases this process significantly.
2. BCS in 2010 supports database write-backs. While the Business Data Catalog in 2007 was read only, the 2010 version allows for full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) capabilities. There are some limits, however, to the write-back capabilities when building BCS entities in SharePoint Designer (SPD). SPD does not elegantly deal with some of the database columns that are important to the functioning of the database but where the values are handled behind-the-scenes rather than through end user input. Additionally, delete operations will run into issues for tables that have records in related tables. In general, write back operations will not be ones that should be designed in SharePoint Designer, but rather developed with code through Visual Studio.
3. The last thing that is new with BCS 2010 is the notion of external lists. With the 2007 version, you could only add external columns to an already-existing SharePoint list. With 2010, you can make an entire list consist of only external data.

There are many compelling uses for this new technology, such as pulling in data from Siebel, PeopleSoft or other enterprise system. Another example is the building of a customer dashboard, which might consist of information from market research databases and an order fulfillment system. Such a dashboard might include the following web parts:

• Customer Details, displaying a customer profile from a Customers table in a database
• Recent Orders, displaying information from an order fulfillment system, based on the Customer ID
• Customer Service Calls, which would extract from a help desk ticketing system, also based on the Customer ID

Every company has its existing enterprise systems that contain relevant business data, not all of which have been historically available to those who need to access the information. SharePoint’s BCS capabilities provide an extra layer of connectivity and presentation to help bring that information to the surface, making it available to those who need the information.

This month’s tip contributed By Ben Nadler, Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Consultant.