From the course: SharePoint 2010 Essential Training
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Using Business Connectivity Services (BCS) - SharePoint Tutorial
From the course: SharePoint 2010 Essential Training
Using Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
You can't get everything into SharePoint and nor do you probably want to. A typical company has many systems. You have got back end databases and SQL Server, Oracle. You have systems like PeopleSoft and SAP, mainframe applications, custom line of business applications. Those aren't going to certainly disappear and it wouldn't be practical to extract all their data to store inside SharePoint. But we do often want to get to that data and to get it into SharePoint lists and reports and dashboards. We can use something called Business Connectivity Services or BCS to connect to those external databases and those external lines of business systems. Any reasonably up-to-date system that accepts a pretty standardized way of connection such as a web service or a .NET database driver, or OLE DB will allow us to connect to it using BCS. In the last version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, this was called the Business Data Catalog. It's been added to since then and it's certainly a little easier…