Business Data Catalog

The Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a new SharePoint feature available in the Enterprise edition of MOSS. It bridges the gap between an organization’s SharePoint portal and its Line of Business (LOB) applications, allowing end-users to view and search all information from the organization through a single interface. The BDC is capable of surfacing dynamic, real-time content from backend databases and web services without the need to duplicate the data in SharePoint storage. Accessing data from LOB systems requires the creation of a configuration file that is more or less a roadmap between SharePoint and the application. This document is created in XML and stored in the Shared Service Provider. Once it has been created, users can take advantage of SharePoint’s web part framework to display and format results from LOB applications throughout the SharePoint site without the need to write any code.

For more information on the BDC including the web parts it includes and its integration with search and user profiles see the document below.

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