What is Business Connectivity Services
What is Business Connectivity Services? Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a platform that enables secure, real-time sharing of information between organizations using Microsoft cloud services. With BCS, you can publish and subscribe to business data, manage and synchronize contacts, schedule appointments, and resources, and send and receive business documents.
Business Connectivity Services provides a common platform to connect your business applications (e.g. CRM, ERP, etc.). So, you can use the same credentials to log on to multiple applications.
What is Business Connectivity Services? Why does it matter?
Business connectivity services are the future of business. More specifically, business connectivity services are Internet services that enable business users to access core business applications and data sources from anywhere, on any device, at any time.
Business connectivity services are used by business users to make better and more informed decisions, collaborate more efficiently with other employees and business partners, and boost productivity and competitiveness. Business connectivity services are also designed to help businesses make more money by bringing more leads and opportunities to the front door and ultimately improving sales performance.
How do business connectivity services work?
Business connectivity services are a great way for businesses to connect with each other by making data transfers easier. Businesses can connect with each other to transfer data, share information, or even to get ahold of information from different companies in a much easier way.
Business connectivity services are a very efficient way for companies to share information with each other that they would not have been able to share before. Companies have the ability to connect with each other in a much easier way, which makes it a lot easier to get the data that you need for your business. It also increases collaboration between different businesses, which helps with communication.
What are the benefits of business connectivity services?
The following are the benefits of business connectivity services:
Familiar User Interface
External content types provide SharePoint behaviors (such as Web Parts, lists, and profile pages) and Office type features (such as Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Outlook tasks and appointments, and Microsoft SP Workspace 2010 lists), and capabilities to external data and services. As a result, users can work in natively-known work environments without having to learn different user interfaces.
Read or Write to External Systems
When collaborating with other businesses, Microsoft Business Connectivity Services enables customers to create, read, update/modify, and get returns from their external system via a Microsoft Office application or SharePoint site if the external system supports the operations and is modeled correctly by the Business Data Connectivity service.
No-Code Connectivity to External Systems
Using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, the solution developer can tell Microsoft SharePoint Server explicitly what data he or she wants. If a data source type is supported natively by Business Connectivity Services, the solution developer does not have to write code to develop an interface for the external system.
Governance of External Data
Accessing data in external systems can be complex because each of these systems is comprised of individual databases with unique sets of facilities, purpose-made methods for access control and logging, and their own security protocols.
Thankfully, when data from your integrated system is loaded into SharePoint Server 2010 by the Business Data Connectivity server service, you will have a single consolidated version that everyone can rely upon due to the straightforward audit procedure options. This makes sure that all versions of the data, no matter where they originated, are all located in one central location!
Offline Access to External Data
Business Connectivity Services is a service in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows users working with embedded Office client and Web applications to work efficiently against external data even when they are offline or if the connection to the server is slow, intermittent or unavailable. The read/write operations performed against cached external items synchronize when connectivity with the server is available.
Discovery Through Search
When looking for more information on a business connection, you have to find out who to talk to at your customer’s company. However, the account manager is not stored in SharePoint Enterprise Search as an indexed property so any users who are not familiar with the specialized application(s) will be unable to access the necessary data – although you might know that it’s possible if this information were stored somewhere on the server.
Life Cycle Management
Business Connectivity Services allows you to work with business data from the Office family of products in smaller and larger applications that are easier to link up with external systems, declaratively and by writing code. You can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to make a model more quickly. Visual Studio gives you the option of building a contextual bridge between two different sets of artifacts.
Conclusion
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a Microsoft cloud-based platform that provides secure access to on-premises data for line-of-business applications in the cloud. BCS lets you build and manage secure connections between your line-of-business applications and cloud services like Microsoft’s Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure. Learn more about BCS at the Microsoft TechNet website.
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