The previous chapter showed you how to work with data that was inside SharePoint, that is, Lists and Libraries. This chapter, however, may be the most eye-opening one for you in this book, in terms of the development possibilities that the SharePoint platform can offer.

In the vast majority of cases in my experience in custom development, the application needs to involve and/or directly integrate data that comes from other resources to SharePoint. Most of the time, this data resides in a relational database or is available via a web services call—data such as customers, employees, products, orders, lookup tables, and so on.

SharePoint Designer 2010 will once again prove itself a capable development tool to offer you no code solutions for integrating external data. The ease of connecting to relational data or web service data will be demonstrated in this chapter, and then we will explore many different techniques to exploit these data connections in SharePoint.

The net result shows why many people are choosing SharePoint 2010 as the integration platform—for the rapid delivery of custom applications!