Chapter 12: Working with the Business Data Catalog

Overview

Although SharePoint is an excellent data repository, a typical company keeps much of its operational and historical data in other systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and custom line-of-business (LOB) applications. These are often called back-end systems; they often run on mainframe or midrange computers and have been in place for many years. It would be impractical to reengineer them to use SharePoint for data storage, but you need to extract their data for reports, KPIs (discussed in Chapter 11), and other aspects of SharePoint collaboration.

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a new SharePoint feature that enables users to access data from these other data sources via specialized Web Parts and in lists and libraries. Throughout this chapter, you find out:

• What the BDC is and how you can use it for organizations

• What various roles are associated with the BDC

• How to use the various BDC Web Parts to display business data on pages within a SharePoint site

• How to display and associate business data within a list

• How to manage and control access to business data within a BDC application

This chapter prepares a user who is responsible for displaying business data on the SharePoint site to interact with and expose the information he or she needs.

Tip 

Note that this chapter does not supply the information that a developer or data specialist requires to define the application for import into the Business Data Catalog or to develop custom applications that interact with the Business Data Catalog. You can find more information on those tasks, including samples, in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK located at msdn.microsoft.com.