For those of you who are tired of using Notepad or an xml editor in order to configure the BDC

The August SharePoint SDK is now available and includes the new BDC Definition Editor.  Go to Brian’s blog post to read more about it - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/08/22/announcing-the-microsoft-business-data-catalog-definition-editor-for-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx

I know a lot of customers and partners have been asking for this.  You’ll also see us coming out with more prescriptive guidance around connecting SharePoint to LOB systems.  We started with SAP but will be expanding to Oracle (Siebel, PeopleSoft) and others on our Interoperability site which is another great resource to point folks to - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb544954.aspx

What's the BDC ? you might ask, the Business Data Catalog is a great technology in MOSS2007 allowing you to crawl and search across different data sources and applications and then do cross-content searches.

Searching on BDC ? , Enterprise Search is a good starting point, you can also find the MSDN Forum on BDC

Think about going to the MOSS portal and with one search retrieve all relevant data about a given customer, Office documents, email, order records from the erp system , extra customer info from the crm system, etc . Ever heard about "putting information at your fingertips" ?

There also is a Tool from LightningTools called BDC Meta Man, you might also give that a try .

Philippe