Business Connectivity Services and Duet Enterprise

Duet Enterprise makes it easy to access the SAP external system, and perform customization by using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

Applies to: Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP Server 2.0 | Office 2010 | SharePoint Server 2010

Business Connectivity Services enables users to read and write data from external systems—through web services, databases, and Microsoft .NET Framework assemblies—from within SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 applications. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications provide features that can use external data directly, both online and offline. Developers can gain access to a rich set of features and rapidly build solutions by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010.

Using SharePoint External Content Types in Duet Enterprise

A SharePoint external content type is a reusable collection of metadata that contains connectivity information and data definitions plus the behaviors that you want to apply to a certain category of external data. Creating an external content type is usually the first step in bringing data from external data sources into SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 applications by using Business Connectivity Services.

External content types enable you to manage and reuse the metadata and behaviors of a Duet Enterprise external content type such as Customer or Order from a central location, and enable users to interact with that external data and processes in a more meaningful way. For example, consider a business entity such as Customer. You might want to interact with items of type Customer inside a SharePoint list or work on them offline in Microsoft Outlook 2010. Or, you might want to enable the user to pick a customer from a list of customers in an Orders contract document inside Microsoft Word 2010. You can create an external content type once and then reuse it anywhere you need it.

For information about creating external content types by using SharePoint Designer 2010, see How to: Create an External Content Type Based on a Web Service (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556431.aspx).

For more information about external content types, see What Are External Content Types? (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee556391.aspx).

Using SharePoint External Lists

An external list is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 that enables you to access data from external systems in the same way that SharePoint list data is accessed. External lists use external content types as their data sources. External lists enable you to use the metadata that is already defined about an external content type to create a SharePoint list that has external data that looks and performs in the same way as any other SharePoint list. For more information about using external lists, see Creating Simple Solutions Using Business Connectivity Services (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff464460.aspx).

See Also

Other Resources

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010