Monday, January 16, 2012

Business Data Catalog (BDC) VS Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

What is Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint ?

SharePoint 2010 provides a new set of technologies known as Business Connectivity Services for retrieving, editing, updating, and deleting data from external systems(for e.g. data from ERP or CRM database). BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services.


How is BCS Different from BDC in SharePoint 2007 ?

Even though the BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.

BCS, on the other hand, provides you with Read-Write capable connectivity from Client and Server to Database, WCF/Web Services and .Net Sources.

A Developer can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS 2010 rapid development tools to access external data. For e.g. you can now create read-write connections to external database from SharePoint designer and then can create webpart\other solutions to surface that data.

The BCS data can further be used in other SharePoint Fetaures such as Business Intelligence,Collaboration and in Enterprise Search.

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