Jun 10, 2016

Most organisations use a variety of systems to store their business data and very often they use different front-end interfaces to interact with those data repositories. It would be great to have a single interface to view and update all that business information. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 includes a centralised infrastructure, known as Business Connectivity Services (BCS), that enables you to query, view, and update data from a variety of external systems.

BCS is the evolution of a feature called Business Data Catalog (BDC) introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). The BDC was great but it lacked a designer and essentially provided read-only access to external data. SharePoint 2010 introduced the BCS with a very powerful design tool and out-of the-box support for write operations. BCS is a collection of many components, the BDC Metadata Store, the BDC Service Application and the BDC Runtime being the main ones. We can see the BDC Metadata Store as roughly the equivalent to the Business Data Catalog in MOSS 2007. The acronym BDC these days refers to Business Data Connectivity, although many people still stick to the older terminology.

SharePoint 2013 enhances BCS with a few new features, one of the most prominent being the support for Open Data protocol (OData). SharePoint now has the ability to manipulate data through BCS using OData endpoints. The list of OData providers includes MySQL, PHP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SQL Server Reporting Services, Windows Azure Table Storage, among many others. As the adoption of OData is in a very fast pace in the industry it is fantastic that BCS in SharePoint 2013 allows you to communicate though that HTTP based protocol. Another new feature in BCS is the ability to receive events from the external systems. Now, event receivers can react to changes in data from external systems like a successful sale entered in your CRM system, for example.

The very first step to implement BCS in your SharePoint 2013 farm is to start the BDC Service Application. Open Central Administration and click the link Manage Services on Server under the System Settings section. Now just click the Start link in the Action column for the Business Data Connectivity Service. After providing a few configuration settings for the service you are ready to go to SharePoint Designer and create your first External Content Type (ECT). The ECT is the link to the external data. The UI in SharePoint Designer is very intuitive, making it easy to complete the steps to create the ECT. Once you have an ECT you can create external lists using SharePoint Designer. The external list looks like an ordinary SharePoint List for your end users, but in the backend the data is store in some external system, not the SharePoint Content Database as the native lists.

There are many other ways to be using the external data in SharePoint though BCS. To learn more about this exciting feature in SharePoint 2013 we recommend the course 20489 Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Advanced Solutions.