Hour 14. Understanding Business Connectivity Services
What You’ll Learn in This Hour
• Creating external content types and external lists through SharePoint Designer 2010
• Creating external content types and external lists through Visual Studio
Due to the complexity of the topics discussed, some figures in this book are very detailed and are intended only to provide a high-level view of concepts. Those figures are representational and not intended to be read in detail.
As you’ve seen SharePoint is a great system to store and manage data. However, the capabilities of SharePoint are not limited to data stored within SharePoint. SharePoint connects and works with external data as well. This is possible through Business Connectivity Services, which is a set of features and services that enable SharePoint to connect to external data sources. While SharePoint 2007 had Business Data Connectivity to retrieve external data, it was complex and had limited capability. As you see in this hour the SharePoint team made major improvements in this area, and Business Connectivity Services is a big improvement over its predecessor.