SharePoint 2010 Works Better with External Data

SharePoint and Office 2010 deliver Business Connectivity Services (BCS), a new interface that enables users to view, update, and search selected data in sources external to SharePoint, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This can make important business systems accessible to more workers on a “self-service” basis, reducing their reliance on back-office specialists to complete day-to-day tasks. BCS replaces the SharePoint Server 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC) and delivers substantial improvements, such as the capability to write to external data sources and better development tools. However, Office 2010 is required to access the capabilities from within Office applications.

External Data Not New to SharePoint

Previous releases of SharePoint Server have offered connections to external data sources, but these solutions were difficult to implement and offered limited feature sets. Prior to SharePoint Server 2007, external data could only be accessed by custom code written by skilled developers. SharePoint Server 2007 introduced the BDC, which acted as a bridge between the Web portal and back-end databases and business applications, such as CRM or ERP systems.