1. SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Module 5: Business Connectivity Services

2. Overview Business Connectivity Services

3. Lesson: Business Connectivity Services Overview Business Connectivity Services Upgrading

4. Overview Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the evolution of the Business Data Catalog (BDC)! Changes include:  Read AND Write  Tools for creating, debugging and maintaining your Application Definition files Offline data support Code Generation for CRUD operations and interfaces  End users can do it!

5. Business Connectivity Services Goals of BCS  Bring External data into SharePoint  Provide external data in a central location  Extend the reach of Enterprise Data  Easily customized solutions (by End Users!)

6. External Content Type A building block for creating applications You can add ECTs via  SharePoint Designer  Visual Studio 2010  Import as App Def External Lists  Built from External Content Types  Allow usage of the list forms to add/modify and delete items from the ECT!

7. Drawbacks to BCS BCS automatic form generation really only works with denormalized, non-relational tables structures  Doesn’t work well for workflow processes (insert data that spans multiple tables/datasources)  Can be used to insert something, that would start a process, which in turn could have some simple steps later on Great for simple inserts and viewing data!

8. Upgrading Older Business Data Catalog files will not import into the new BCS/BDC You will need to migrate them to the new schema New Schema is available at  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Bin\bdcmetadata.xsd BDCMetaman can do the conversion for you  www.lightningtools.com www.lightningtools.com

9. Demonstration: BCS Let’s look at:  Creating a BCS application

10. Lab 1: BCS Complete the lab exercises:  Create BCS Application

11. Lab 2: BCS with Data Warehouse Complete the lab exercises:  Create BCS Application using our Data Warehouse data

12. Lab 3: BCS and Office 2010 Complete the lab exercises:  Create BCS Application that feed Office 2010 Applications

13. Summary Business Connectivity Services is a powerful way of gain access to Enterprise data Simple integration with SharePoint Lists and forms for End Users Multiple ways to create and use BCS Applications as End Users!