The SI SharePoint Blog

The right way to think of Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010 is probably as a pipe you can attach your data to, and, once you’re connected, that pipe can take you anywhere within SharePoint and Office.  One shouldn’t be taken in by the hype here – this is the sort of functionality Microsoft often oversells as a magical tool for anything – but within the limitations BCS looks like a really useful technology for anyone who has data in various systems that they want to display in a SharePoint context.  Which is probably everyone.

There are four approaches to BCS, two of them are comparatively easy and can be used with SharePoint Designer, and the other two are more difficult and are used with Visual Studio.

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