While at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas I went to a session on SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Steve Fox from Microsoft presented and he did the best session so far today.

Essentially BCS is technology built into
SharePoint that allows you to build applications in SharePoint that are connected to third party systems like SAP, CRM or any other data driven applications.

- To use BCS, you will essentially need to create a lot of code that provides the "hooks" that let you connect SharePoint and the other application.

- As per the above, there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of coding to create the connections. Clearly a third party tool like Lightning Tools will be needed. I will go to their booth later and update my blog with their plans. UPDATE – Went to the Lightning Tools booth and they clarified that BCS will be supported with their graphical tools.

- Unlike the old BDC in 2007, you can create fully functional interfaces to other apps. For example we just saw a Word template use BDC data to populate company information in an invoice. You can also modify the look and feel of the SharePoint interface to make the data appear in a familiar interface for the user.

- Again, unlike the BDC (to the best of my knowledge anyway), you can update the source application data rather than just reading the data into SharePoint.

Unfortunately I had to leave the session a little early but this is generally the concept of how BCS works.

-Bill