Using Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Kirk Evans
One of my kids’ favorite books is called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff─a children’s book based on the slippery-slope notion that if you give a mouse a cookie, he will ask for milk, realizing he is thirsty. When he drinks the milk, he will ask for a mirror, then some scissors, then a broom, then some crayons, and on and on, asking for a new item once he realizes the utility of the item he currently has.

This is how I see many users progressing along the adoption timeline with SharePoint: they begin slowly, uploading a few documents, and then progress to using workflows and forms and ultimately wanting to surface external data on their site. It isn’t until you see how easy one task was to accomplish that you decide to go for the next challenge.

It’s a common scenario: I have a portal, I have some external data, and I want to integrate that data into my portal in a meaningful way. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) introduced the Business Data Catalog (BDC) to facilitate this exact scenario: make it easy to surface external data inside a portal experience. For example, you can create an XML definition file that defines the mapping between SharePoint and your external data so it can be rendered in a Web Part, used as a column within a list and even integrated into search.

When I show companies how they can use BDC to map to existing line-of-business applications, the light bulb usually turns on after I show search results that include people, documents, list data and data from their existing LOB system─all within the same set of results.

Even though the BDC in MOSS 2007 enabled connectivity to external systems, it was difficult to create solutions because of the lack of a designer. Furthermore, though BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 is all about connecting to external data. BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services. BCS builds upon its BDC predecessor in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management. For example, in SharePoint 2010 it’s easy to create an external content type with SharePoint Designer, create an external list in SharePoint’s Web user interface and take the list offline into Outlook as a set of contacts. Also, you can make updates to contacts in Outlook that will cause the data in the external system to update as well.

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