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Leveraging External Data In SharePoint

John Ramminger

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Welcome to SharePoint Saturday Houston

• Please turn off all electronic devices or set them to vibrate• If you must take a phone call, please do so in the hall so as not

to disturb others• Special thanks to our Title Sponsor, ProSymmetry

Thank you for being a part of the 5th Annual SharePoint Saturday

for the greater Houston area!

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Thanks to all our Sponsors!

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Information• Speaker presentation slides should be available

from the SPSHOU website within a week or so

• The Houston SharePoint User Group will be having it’s next meeting Wednesday April 15th. Please join us at www.h-spug.org

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John Ramminger

– Innovative consulting company providing consulting, tools and managed services for the SharePoint platform.

– Email: JohnRamminger@RammWare.net– Twitter: @JohnRam– Website: www.RammWare.net (Under Construction)

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What will this talk cover?• Business Connectivity Services as it relates to on-

premise deployments of SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

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What is BCS?• Business Connectivity Services is the component

of SharePoint that will allow you to connect to external data sources from within SharePoint

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What can you do with BCS?• Supports all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete)

operations• Data is Searchable via SharePoint Search once

Crawled.• You can leverage the power of search to view

external data in a new an exciting way with SharePoint display templates.

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What is required to work with BCS?• SharePoint Designer• Visual Studio• 3rd Party Tools• Farm Administrator Access

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What Data Can You Connect To?• SQL Server (Most Common)• Oracle• Any External Source that Can be connected to.

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Does BCS support relationships?• SharePoint Designer supports creating 1

relationship.• Visual Studio and External Tools can support

multiple 1 to many relationships.• Visual Studio provides a visual designer for

relationships to help users better understand there BCS model.

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What about SharePoint Online• It is possible to implement BCS using SharePoint

online however, in my experience very few companies want to risk sensitive data to the cloud.

• Depending on data usage, your organization could be subject to additional fees for data transferred between the source system and SharePoint online.

• Stay tuned to twitter for a future presentation and video series on BCS in SharePoint online.

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How does BCS work?• BCS is driven by an XML document called a Model

file. Each table or entity that you are exposing to SharePoint is represented in the model.

• The model file can be moved from environment to environment and updated so you don’t need to rebuild the model completely.

• When developing with Visual Studio or wanting to crawl the external model incrementally, you will need to update the model file by editing the XML directly.

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INPO and 30 Second Page Load Times• Built on SharePoint 2010• Using SharePoint Designer BCS Connections• Needed “Real Time” updates• Thinking outside the box is not always a good

thing.• Why business owners should leave the tech to the

tech people.

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BCS can be fast if you let it• Solution redesigned to use a Visual Studio built

model with multiple methods on each entity.• Caching was used to make sure that the data was

fast as well as being up to date.• Page load times with more information on the

page were clocking in at 4-6 seconds after.

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BCS in SharePoint Designer• Pros:– Quick to get going.– Developers are not required.– Free tool.

• Cons:– Limited in what you can build from a relationship

perspective.– Not able to automate deployment of model.

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BCS in Visual Studio• Pros:– Powerful and flexible– Automated deployment of model– Visual model designer

• Cons:– Developers required.– Complex– Model file editing required for deployment.

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Search and BCS• BCS data can be crawled and surfaced with out of

the box search or custom display templates can be used to really show the information a user is looking for.

• Incremental crawls can be done with the use of a time stamp field and configuring the model file to see that update field.

• Visual Studio users must update the model file to be able to view their model in content sources ui.

• Separate content sources should be used for each model.

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Full Stack BCS Demo• Subject Matter Expert finder solution built as a

proof of concept for national accounting firm.• 3 Tables, Employees, Skills and Licenses.• Crawled with SharePoint to be searchable.• Demonstrates relations between tables.• Automated Deployment of Model file.• Videos and Download Package available.

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Questions?• John Ramminger (JohnRamminger@RammWare.net)• @JohnRam on Twitter• Visual Studio Videos - http://1drv.ms/1t17eVd• Download Example from: http://1drv.ms/1xfD2os

I am available to consult on your BCS implementations. Please let me know how I can help you reach your objectives.

Thank you for your time!

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