Now that we have shown you the basics on how to:

Go ahead and take BCS out for a test drive! To do this you can download a preloaded 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta) from MSDN. By downloading machine “A” of the two will get you access to a preconfigured environment with:

  1. Customer from CRM External Content Type mapped to Contact Office native type
  2. Customer from CRM External List
  3. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
  4. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1 + CU2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
  5. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
  6. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition
  7. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2
  8. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2
  9. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2
  10. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2
  11. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2
  12. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

Once you have it up and running go to the http://intranet.contoso.com/sites/SP2010AllUp to try out the Customers from CRM external list, take it offline into Outlook or SharePoint Workspace, or even create an external content type of your own off of the Customers or AdventureWorksDW database using SharePoint Designer. Be sure to take a look at the performance indications on the MSDN download page for an optimal experience.

- Lionel Robinson