BDC Catalog Visual Editor now available

  • Article

Many ISV's are interested in surfacing data in your appliation into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). MOSS introduced the Business Data Catalog (BDC) for you to do just that without code.

The BDC bridges the gap between the portal site and your application. You can bring in key data into:

  • Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists
  • Web Parts
  • Search
  • User profiles
  • Custom applications

You describe the connection between the database and MOSS by defining a metadata model in XML. And until recently, that editing was done in raw XML.

But now Microsoft has released the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor, which has been designed to assist in the lifecycle management for Application Definition files. Now you can edit that metadata model using a visual designer. The tool enables searching over databases and web service-based repositories, as well as the connection for BDC web parts in MOSS.

The Business Data Catalog Definition Editor has been included in the newest release of the MOSS 2007 SDK and is available now.