Business Connectivity Services replaces the legacy Business Data Catalog (BDC)
from SharePoint 2007. Business Connectivity Services allows
administrators to configure external data sources or line of business
data connectors from almost any source outside SharePoint 2010/2013.
Business Connectivity Services then allows users of SharePoint to
interact with external data via external content types and lists, which for all intents and purposes, look and behave just like their internal counterparts.
Business Connectivity Services components package with SharePoint 2013 Foundation and allow administrators to configure external content types
(ECTs) when referencing external data types. These external content
types then shape the data exposed to users via external data lists.
Administrators and developers define external content types via
SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio 2010/2012. By writing them in
code, developers have almost limitless capability in exposing external
data in SharePoint as long as they can query the external data source
via some form of code API.
Business Connectivity Services exists as a
service application in your SharePoint 2013 farm. However, the core
functionality of Business Connectivity Services consists of a number of
services and components. Figure 1 shows a visual of the various components.
It is worth mentioning that while Business Connectivity Services is
available to Foundation users, certain components, such as user profile
extensions, Business Data Web Parts, and search integration, are still
available only to Enterprise license users. The majority of Business
Connectivity Services components, however, reside in the core
offering—available to all SharePoint license types—and include
connectors to standard data sources via OData, WCF, SQL, and .NET code.
Figure 1
shows that Business Connectivity Services consists of a number of
component areas. Probably the most interesting to administrators are
the connector framework components, which control connectivity to
external data sources. Developers will most likely take an interest in
the extensibility components, which consist of several APIs to develop
custom entities and connectors for nonstandard data sources.
You may recognize some of the components in the
SharePoint 2013 Enterprise group, which includes Web Parts to surface
external data, extensions, search, and use of the Secure Store Service
to facilitate management of third-party service credentials.
The grouping of Outlook 2013 components
illustrates those components that enable the reuse of Business
Connectivity Services components in Outlook. Outlook works closely with
SharePoint to provide user access to lists, libraries, and feeds. Now,
Outlook 2013 can aggregate certain third-party external data.
Because this section is an overview of Business Connectivity Services, I shall mention some of the following benefits that Business Connectivity Services provides:
- True integration: Users view all external data like SharePoint data. SharePoint abstracts the end user from the external data.
- Read/Write: Whereas legacy BDC (SharePoint 2007) only
allowed read-only view of data, Business Connectivity Services allows
write-back. Users can make changes to data in external data lists, and
Business Connectivity Services will update the external data source.
- Office application integration: Since external data surfaces
via SharePoint external lists, any Office application that understands
SharePoint list technology may query the external data. Developers may
access external data via the same API they would use to open any
standard list in SharePoint.
- Support for BLOBs: Business Connectivity Services supports source content in the form of Binary Objects (BLOBs).
- Extensive security control: Business Connectivity Services
provides greater security over data aggregated into SharePoint, as well
as the various authentication methods required to access external data
sources.
- Search Integration: Business Connectivity Services
integrates in with SharePoint search, meaning users can search across
external data stores, like any source internal to SharePoint.
- Support for OData: Business Connectivity Services now supports Open Data protocols (HTTP, JSON, and Atom).
