Configuring Business Connectivity Services

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) solutions are custom solutions that integrate with SharePoint Server (as well as
SharePoint Online). Developing a BCS solution requires both deep business application knowledge (such as what types
of entities need to be managed) and development experience with Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer or the Microsoft
Office Developer Tools.

BCS can be used in a number of scenarios, such as the following:

 Retrieving and presenting external data from enterprise applications or web services

 Enabling offline use of external data

 Connecting structured data from enterprise applications with unstructured data such as documents and images

 Building applications to update and interact with data in enterprise or external applications

While building external applications that leverage BCS is outside the scope of...

Overview of BCS
As mentioned previously, the purpose of BCS is to provide a mechanism to retrieve and manipulate data stored in
external business applications or systems. BCS can be used to embed remote datasets in your own applications, giving
users a familiar interface to manipulate or view data.

For example, if you are a reseller of restaurant supplies, you may want to connect to the manufacturer or other wholesale
distributors and import their data catalogs into custom applications that your employees use to quote and resell equipment
to end customers. Using BCS, you can create connections to your suppliers' applications and render that data in your own
applications.

Depending on the data source and external data configuration you need, BCS can be used to support create, read,
update, delete, query (CRUDQ) operations.

Overview of Secure Store

Secure Store can be thought of as a type of credential vault for SharePoint. You can store credentials for authenticating
into external applications. Credentials are stored in a configuration item called a target application.

Before the Secure Store service can be used, however, you'll need to prepare it to be able to store and encrypt
credentials.

To prepare Secure Store, follow these steps:

1. Launch Central Administration.

2. Select Application Management, and then select Manage service applications.
3. Select Secure Store Service and then click Manage from the ribbon:
4. The first time you manage the Secure Store Service application, you'll be prompted to generate a key, as shown in
the following screenshot:
5. On the ribbon, in the Key Management group, click Generate New Key.
6. Enter a passphrase to encrypt the database. Record the passphrase in a safe place, as it will be not possible to
retrieve it in the future. Click OK:
Once the key has been generated...

Planning for external content types

BCS utilizes external content types. Similar to normal content types (which can be metadata columns, properties, and
workflows that are applied to a piece of data), an external content type allows you to apply those same concepts to
external data. External content types allow the reuse of metadata and actions on external data sources.

External content types can be used to create and represent external data as the following types of objects:

 External lists: External lists are the most common type of object in BCS solutions. External lists use an external
content type as their source, allowing you to create a SharePoint list populated with external data. External lists
function just like any other SharePoint list, providing a familiar interface to interact with data. External lists, depending
on the connected system, may allow you to write back to the source. If configured, users can make changes to
content in the external list, which will get synchronized...

Configuring connections to external data sources

Once your organization has decided on what external data sources to interact with, you can work with your partners,
suppliers, vendors, or customers to create a connection to their data source.

When connecting to external applications or data sources, you'll need to work with the provider of the application or data
source to obtain some sort of credential, as well as any other special configurations that are necessary to successfully
configure the relationship. In this example, we're going to configure BCS to connect to Salesforce to give you an idea of
how these components work together.
As a prerequisite, you'll need to configure a Salesforce-connected app. Configure OAuth settings and grant the API
permissions to access and manage data. Record the consumer key and the consumer secret.

Note: This example is really intended to show one way that BCS can be used at a basic level. For information on
configuring Salesforce...

Planning and configuring search for BCS applications

Since an external list functions like any other SharePoint content list, it can be indexed and searched. The content isn't
available to search by default, however, so it must be added as a content source. Once you've added the BCS data as a
content source and crawled the BCS content, you will be able to search for it.

To configure search for BCS data, follow these steps:

1. Launch Central Administration, select Application Management, select Manage service applications, and then
click Search.
2. Under Crawling, click Content Sources.
3. On the Manage Content Sources page, click New Content Source:
4. Enter a name for the content source and select Line of Business Data as Content Source Type. Select
a Business Data Connectivity Service Application option and then select a data source. Click OK when you're
finished:
 5. Right-click the data source and start a full crawl.

After you've done this, you can search for content that...

Summary
In this chapter, we covered BCS and Secure Store, and how they interact. BCS can be used to render remote datasets in
the local SharePoint system, making it available for queries or to custom applications. Depending on the remote data,
BCS can also support data modification, delete, and query operations. You learned how Secure Store, credential storage,
and management services can be used by BCS when connecting to remote data sources. Finally, we walked through
some sample configurations with both BCS and Secure Store.

In the next chapter, we'll cover managed metadata concepts and how metadata can be used to improve the
discoverability of data.