Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Business Data Catalog
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 comes with an exciting new component called the Business Data Catalog. Over time company’s and organisations IT systems grow organically. It would be a software developers dream to be able to start from scratch every five years with a clean slate to be able to design a company’s IT infrastructure and software requirements. What generally happens is IT systems grow and change as the business does. This means that different departments end up with different databases, user interfaces, logins, backup policies. All the things IT and users dislike! And worst of all these systems may not be able to share information between them meaning large scale duplication.
With the Business Data Catalog and MOSS 2007 it is now possible to integrate these different business systems and data stores to provide a single user interface for users to view data, search across different business systems, use the data within documents, and build custom reports and KPI’s.
The World before the Business Data Catalog
Integrating these Islands of Data as we’ll refer to them is nothing new in the world of SharePoint, the new part is how easy it has become. Back in the world of SharePoint 2003 the only real way to be able to view and interact with data from other SQL Server, Oracle, and other data stores was to create custom web parts to access and display it. Although not particularly difficult, developers had to code, test and deploy these solutions for each separate system they wanted to make use of. Of course SQL Server, Oracle and the other types of data stores each had their own API and intricacies of how to pull data our meaning there was something else developers had to be aware of. And although web parts were great, that was just about the only way the data could be used. Pretty limited if you as me!
Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Business Data Catalog.
So with the arrival of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 comes the new component the Business Data Catalog. This will allow you to integrate these islands of data into SharePoint without necessarily needing a developer to write a single line of code (we’ll come back to that later!). To be able to make use of the Business Data Catalog you’ll need to be using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition.
Once integrated you can now make use of your data in a number of different ways.
1, Out-of-the-box Web Parts
A number of web parts ship with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that allow you to display data from the Business Data Catalog just be executing a few mouse clicks. These range from Business Data List Web Parts that retrieve data for an entity to the Business Data Item web part that will display a single record for you.
2, SharePoint Lists
SharePoint is largely about collaborating together with people around documents and lists. Tagging documents, files and lists items with Metadata allows for improved searching, creation of custom views, alert configuration, custom views, and much much more. Once your Island of Data is integrated to MOSS 2007 by means of the Business Data Catalog you can them make use of the Business Data column type for your document libraries.
3, Search
If you have a 10,000 product catalogue in an Oracle database you aren’t going to want to view a web part that displays 20 records at a time, paging through the records until you find the one you want. Also what if you wanted to find all the products that were of the colour blue? Integrating your backend data with MOSS 2007 and the Business Data Catalog opens up the opportunity to get MOSS 2007 to crawl, index, and return your data in SharePoint Search results.
As well as your business data being returned in Search results along with other items such as documents and tasks, it is also possible to create a custom search scope for your business data and get the results displayed in a results tab of their own.
4, User Profile Importer
Important personal data can often be stored outside of Active Directory in something such as SAP or Siebel. With the business data catalog you can plug these profile properties into your SharePoint site rather than having to re-enter them into your AD.
5, Custom Solutions
Although the out-of-the-box Business Data Catalog Web Parts are very useful and functional, sometimes it is a business requirement to have a custom Web Part developed to present data in a way that makes sense to the user. The Business Data Catalog has an object model available to developers to pull data from the backend system. With developers coding against the BDC object model, they do not need to know the API or intricacies of the data source they are actually accessing. This means they can read data from SQL Server, Oracle, Web Services and other ADO.NET compliant data sources through one common Business Data Catalog Object Model.
Another nice scenario that can be accomplished with the Business Data Catalog object model is drawing and presenting data from two different business data sources. For example you may have product information in SQL Server and Sales data in Oracle. By creating a Web Part and accessing data via the BDC object model you can display and mix the data from both of these data sources to show a complete view of your product lines and sales data.