11. Leveraging the Business Data Catalog (BDC)
In this Chapter
As the office manager of an organization, you want to be able to show users the supplies available to be ordered. Not only do you want to show the supply but if a user selects a particular supply, such as a printer, you also want a message to appear that describes the computers the printer is compatible with and the other products that need to be ordered, such as paper, ink, and so on. When you ask the IT department about creating the solution, they reply that the information is stored in a database and must be developed. They can put the project on the list, but you’re probably looking at three to four months before they can get to the project and you need to provide the funding. This might not be horrible, but what if you could set up the solution with just a little help from the IT department. This is what the Business Data Catalog (BDC) is all about. It allows information stored in other line-of-business (LOB) applications to be displayed in SharePoint. The initial setup needs to be completed more than likely by a developer or administrator, but after that, a power user or information worker can use the data in their own solutions.
Basically, the BDC provides a front end for LOB applications within the organization. For instance, critical business information such as a customer database might be stored in Microsoft SQL Server, but the front end is how the information workers access that information. In the preceding example, the front end is what would have taken the time to write and design. With MOSS Enterprise, the IT department just needs to provide and upload the application definition file, which will be discussed next, and the solutions can be created by the business users.
The following sections walk you through how the BDC is set up; using the outof-the-box (OOB) features of the BDC such as Web Parts, search, and the business data column; and ideas for creating custom solutions using the BDC data.