Microsoft Business Connectivity Services Team Blog

Chances are you’ve already read Brad Stevenson’s post Types of Solutions and you’re interested in building a BCS solution. If you’ve read my post on the BCS Solution Packaging Tool , perhaps you’ve already tried to build and package a solution yourself...

If you’ve read Brad Stevenson’s post Types of Solutions then you’re already familiar with the three types of BCS solutions: Simple Out-Of-Box Solutions Intermediate Declarative Solutions Advanced Code-Based Solutions This post will discuss the different...

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) has a synchronization framework that uses a client cache to enable you to work with external data even when disconnected. In this post, we’ll discuss ways to optimize solutions to best use the synchronization framework...

With Database, Web Service and WCF connectors, there is one and only one external system. BCS understands how to connect to these external systems, and it supports Secure Store integration out-of-box for these connectors. Within a .NET assembly connector...

BCS is a cool framework to bring external data to Office Applications on the client. But due to various reasons like misconfigured BDC models/ Advanced Code-Based Solutions/ Intermediate Declarative Solutions or External System’s business logic, the expected...

We just uploaded the next installment on the BCS Team Channel. In this video Sanjay Rama takes you through a quick introduction and demo of the Secure Store Service. Secure Store Service is the new single sign on service in SharePoint 2010. It provides...

Hi this is Juan Balmori with another post for the BCS blog. This is a follow up to my previous post, about the external item picker . There is a problematic scenario that you may face: You are searching for an external item on the picker dialog that you...

Eric White posted great content on how to Search External Data in SharePoint 2010 using BCS . Here is the overview of the post from his blog: Overview This article will examine how to use SharePoint Designer to define an external content type (ECT) and...

Filters are used by Microsoft Business Connectivity Service (BCS) to give values to input parameters while invoking a Method on the External System (LobSystem). But there could be some parameters whose values should be provided by the system (example...

Tajeshwar Singh wrote a white paper which shows you how to use Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to access and surface BLOB data in the SharePoint user interface and search. Check out the overview below...

If you’ve read Brad Stevenson’s post Types of Solutions , you’re already familiar with the range of BCS Solutions across three levels: Simple out-of-box solutions Intermediate declarative solutions Advanced code-based solutions Simple solutions are easily...

When getting acquainted with BCS, most new users work against an unsecured backend. This means they can ignore the issue of authentication and focus on the fun stuff, like making external lists and searching external content. But real world external systems...

The SharePoint Team Blog has a great series that walks you through the creation of an external list using Visual Studio 2010 and the new Business Data Connectivity Designer! The first two posts of the series are already live with more to come. Walkthrough...

Check out the SharePoint SPIdentity Team Blog to read up on how Identity was implemented in SharePoint 2010. There, aside from an introductory post , you’ll find the first to parts to a series of blog articles that talk about configuring claims-based...

In the last post , we covered how to use Sandboxed Workflow Actions to lessen the stress on your external system. In this post, we will cover the final option for writing activities that surface BCS data to be used in SharePoint Designer (SPD): Full Trust...

Previous posts have mentioned how to represent business data as external content types , creating external lists out of these external content types, and how to eventually make this business data available offline in Office applications like Outlook and...

As mentioned in the overview post, Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 allows end users to interact with external data using SharePoint and Office interfaces. For this, BCS provides an abstract data access layer that SharePoint and Office...

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides many out-of-box capabilities that deliver rich, end-to-end solutions. BCS is also a programmable platform, allowing developers to further extend BCS to create customized solutions. Three types of BCS solutions...

Your external list worked great when you tested it, but it’s not working on the deployment server! Reading the SharePoint logs , you see a message like one of these: Timeout expired. BDC Runtime Object Model has throttled the response. The response from...

Another post for BCS… this is Juan Balmori, I’ve being working in the SharePoint 2010 release on how to simplify customers lives by using data from external systems in Office client applications such as Word and Outlook. This time I am going to focus...

Business Connectivity Services is an enabling technology for integrating data from external systems (e.g. line-of-business like an ERP or CRM system) with SharePoint 2010 and Office. Data in external systems is frequently exposed through granular web...

Now that we have shown you the basics on how to: Create a model using SharePoint Designer Create an external list using SharePoint Designer or the Browser Take the external list into Outlook and/or into SharePoint Workspace Create associations...

In the last post , we covered how to use the out of box SharePoint Workflow activities to work with an External List. In that post, I mentioned that every time you read a column, it will execute both the Read List method (Finder) and the Read Item method...

The BCS Team Channel has a new video in which we show you how in just a few minutes you can create an External Content Type using SharePoint Designer. In this video we use the database connector so be sure to subscribe to the channel to be the first to...

When a user takes an external list offline to either SharePoint Workspace or Outlook, by default the user gets a dialog box like this one. To take the external list offline successfully, the user has to click on the Install button, which means that he...