Today, i was looking to the TechNet videos for SharePoint and i found some interesting videos about Business Data Catalog (BDC). If you known what’s this feature, you can learn more about it here.
Basically, the BDC is a new MOSS’s feature that allows you to integrate business data from the business applications, without spending much effort and without writing any line of code.
The interesting BDC videos to how to start to work with this feature are the following:
Firstly, I watched “Use the Business Data Catalog” video and i was scared because to use this SharePoint feature i need to import an application definition file. And, how do i create it? Actually i don’t want to implement it manually, and after searching about this file’s generation, i found the first video’s topic that explains how to generate this file. So if you want to generate Application Definition file you can use the Application Definition Editor that is inside of the SharePoint Server 2007 SDK.
Well, for me the important question after watched this videos is: When do i should use BDC? For example, you should use BDC when your client has a LOB application and SharePoint Portal, he wants to integrate this application but he don’t want to spend much effort with this integration, because he spent much effort with the individual application’s maintenance. I think that isn’t a good approach for all the business use cases, but it’s a good approach for the simple integrations between applications.
