Business Portal 4.0 Integration Guide
The Business Portal 4.0 Integration guide is now available for download! It has actually been out a little over a month now but I wanted to share the download link and provide a high level overview of it to our blog community. Most of the content in it is around the Data Access method of using the Dynamics GP Web Services and the Business Data Catalog (BDC) feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. There are also chapters on Site Structure, building BDC applications for Search, and methods for distributing your integrations. It is definitely a resource you would want to reference when working with integration and customization scenarios for Business Portal 4.0.
The Data Access concept starts by building new web services using the guidance in the Dynamics GP Web Services Programmers guide which is available in MSDN. This is all new content for the Dynamics GP Web Services documentation by the way and is also available in PartnerSource and CustomerSource. After you have the new web service working you may want to use the BDC Web Parts in MOSS to expose the data in Business Portal 4.0. The BP 4.0 Integration guide then goes through the process of how to create a BDC application based on the GP Web Services platform.
I am attaching a sample I worked on that contains the BDC metadata (xml file), BDC Web Part, and the site cab file to import using stsadm. I have also included a Word document that describes the process using the BDC Definition Editor and importing the xml. The purpose of the sample is to retrieve Batch data like the below screen shot. The current BDC entities in BP 4.0 did not provide this data and the Dynamics GP Web Services already had methods for Batch data (SY00500 table). So I filled the gap by creating a BDC application and web part in a new Site to retrieve that batch data. Using the SharePoint SDK tools along with our Dynamics GP Web Services is the recommended strategy for integrating with Business Portal 4.0 and beyond.
Chris