From the course: SharePoint Designer 2010: Creating Data-Driven Web Pages

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External data sources

External data sources - SharePoint Tutorial

From the course: SharePoint Designer 2010: Creating Data-Driven Web Pages

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External data sources

So let's get into why we're here. We want to connect to some external data, data that is sitting outside of the current SharePoint site. Now, you are ready to get going, but I need us to slow down for a second and think about what we're doing, because there are two very important questions to ask before we jump in. One, why are we doing it? And two, where is your data? And when I ask why are you doing this, I mean what's the reason in each case? Is it all a one-off, ad hoc need? Say you just need a single web page on a single SharePoint site to connect to some orders database and show a list of recent orders. Now this would take the shortest time to do, but it is a one-off. It would be created and customized on a single page, and it's not a reusable solution, though this is often fine. But another scenario might be that you want to define a connection to an external data source because you want something that behaves more like a regular SharePoint list. You want to show it in multiple…

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