The standout feature of BCS  is the SharePoint Search capability – now you can take your relational databases with plain unformatted data and present them in a SharePoint farm  using powerful Search capabilities, social tagging and all the new features that ship with SharePoint 2010. There is also one very important improvement since 2007 – BCS is available even in the free version of SharePoint Foundation 2010, previously it was not available in WSS 3.0.

In this article I will discuss the overall BCS model and demonstrate the configuration of a  connection with BCS in a SharePoint Server 2010 farm.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Administration

BCS Services are administered using  the Business Data Connectivity Service (BDC). If the BDC shortcut is familiar to you from  SharePoint 2007, you should note that BDC no longer means “Business Data Catalog”. BDC is now the service that lets you manage BCS services configuration.

Using the BDC, you can manage external content types (sets of fields from other business applications), external systems (such as SQL Server databases, third party applications, etc) and BDC models (in  XML format).

Business Connectivity Services supports two types of XML definitions (similar to those from BDC in SharePoint 2007) – application models and resource files. Application models contains the XML definitions of the external content types. Resource files describe imported or exported properties, permissions or localized names.

If you are familiar with the previous BDC model, you may expect that to setup BCS you will need to create complex XML definitions using Visual Studio. Of course, you still can, but now there is simpler way, since SharePoint Designer 2010 let you do the job with only few mouse clicks.

Before we actually start some configuration, we will quickly examine  BCS’s functionality and overall model.

External Data Sources

Business Connectivity Services can connect to the following types of external data:

• SQL Server Databases
• SAP Applications
• Web Services – including Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services
• SharePoint based web sites
• Third party applications

Business Connectivity Services Architecture:

• BDC Service – stores and secures external content types.
• Secure Store Service – securely stores credentials for external systems and manages the associations with the internal/SharePoint based identities.
• BDC Server Runtime – uses the BDC data on front-end SharePoint servers to access/execute operations on the external systems for web browsers and other thin  clients.
• BDC Client Runtime – uses the BCS Service and Secure Store Service to access/execute BCS operations on external systems from within the client environment.
• Metadata Cache – provides caching of the BCS Service data. The cache can be optionally encrypted.

BCS Configuration Walkthrough

In the following scenario, I will connect the BDC service to a  SQL Server Database that I  created. To follow this walkthrough, you will need:

• SQL Server Management Studio (to view the tables and to set the database security for BDC).
• SharePoint Designer 2010 (to configure the BCS connections).
• SharePoint Server 2010 fully operational.

First, let’s take a look at the example database in SQL Server. I created table Clients in the exampledb database, which now contains some data that I want to show within SharePoint sites.

Clients Table that will be used as the external source

Launch SharePoint Designer 2010 and open the SharePoint site (which is http://sps2010 in this example).

SharePoint Designer 2010 with the intranet site opened ( http://sps2010 ).

Click the External Content Types option in the navigation pane.

Navigation Pane with “External Content Types” option selected

In the new tab that opens, click on the External Content Type icon. This will create the new External Content Type that we will use to connect with our   SQL Server database.
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With SharePoint 2010, BCS ships with out-of-box features such as solutions, services, and tools which may connecting to external data an easy task. Whether you want to retrieve Outlook contacts in a list offline or edit the contents of your document file or share your excel sheet online or reuse data from dynamic InfoPath forms or just update your business presentation, BCS enables deep content sharing, editing and integration in SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio tools.

BCS Architecture

• BDC Metadata Store – As a part of services layer, BDC Metadata store is a database for external content types that form the fundamental blocks of BCS.
• BDC Server Runtime - BDC Server runtime is an intelligent set of services to access the backend storage and connect to the data based on the defined external content type.
• Security - Secure Store Service (SSS) is integrated to ensure security.
• Solution Packaging -Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) packaging for clients such as Word, Outlook, InfoPath is possible.
• Out of Box UI - Displaying external data with the integration of Web Part’s UI will ensure deeper integration of external lists.
• BDC Client Runtime - The BDC Client Runtime enables offline operations with client-side caching and then reflecting the changes on the server when the client is online.
• Design Tools - SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio – SharePoint Designer helps in creating rich BCS solutions for managing external content types and lists, whilst Visual Studio is suitable for developing advanced solutions with custom code.You can create an external content type using either SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio.

External content types

Before we integrate external data, we need to create an external content type.  You can use the SharePoint site or SharePoint designer to create an external content type. In this example, we will use SharePoint Designer 2010.

Navigate to the External Content Type option in SharePoint Designer 2010.

The External Content Type dialog will be displayed. Enter the Name and Display Name for the external content type. Then, under the External Content Type Information section, select the Office Item Type as Contact from the dropdown list.

Next click the link, Click here to discover external data sources and define operations to integrate the existing customer database.

The Operation Designer dialog will then be displayed. Click Add a Connection to connect to the database. Once the connection is established, the database table will be displayed. Right click the table and select the option, Create All Operations so that you will be able to read, select, update and delete rows from the database table.

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