October, 2011

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for SharePoint 2010 builds on the technology of the Business Data Catalog first introduced in SharePoint 2007. It provides the ability to connect SharePoint to external data sources of all kinds, including but not limited to, other database systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, ERP systems. BCS provides a developer with a means of pre-defining all the information needed by an application to connect with and manipulate this external data through External Content Types (ECT). The most important aspect of ECTs is that once the developer creates it, the ECT will be available for use by SharePoint users to connect and use the external systems without knowing any code. The following diagram displays a high-level overview of how the components of BCS all work together. Business Connectivity Services provides mechanisms to enable experienced users, developers, and business unit IT professionals to do the following much more easily: Reveal...

This diagram demonstrates the project templates and project item templates that you can use when developing Web Parts in Visual Studio. While these templates have the same end result (a cool Web Part running SharePoint), the development experience can vary between working with code or using a designer to build the UI. For more information, see the following MSDN topics. Creating Web Parts for SharePoint Connect Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 Creating SharePoint 2010 Web Parts That Can Read and Write Data to External Data Sources

The SharePoint product marketing team has a list of resources to help you make decisions about hybrid SharePoint environments. Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365   New! Prepare for single sign-on (SSO) – Office 365 The main Deploying Office 365 page The Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises SharePoint Online Planning Guide for Office 365 for enterprises Exchange Online hybrid deployment and migration with Office 365 For more information, see the official blog of the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group .

One major advantage of the SharePoint 2010 development platform is that it provides the ability to save sites as solution packages. A solution package is a deployable, reusable package stored in a .cab file with a .wsp extension. You can create a solution package in the browser, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. In the browser and SharePoint Designer 2010 user interfaces, solution packages are also called templates. This flexibility allows you to create and design site structures in a browser and/or in SharePoint Designer and then import these customizations into Visual Studio 2010 for further development. When the customizations are complete, you can deploy your solution package to SharePoint and use it there. After modifying the existing site structure with a browser, you can start the cycle all over again by saving the updated site as a solution package. This tools continuum also enables you to use other tools. For example, you can design a workflow process...