SharePoint's destiny
is to be the place where information is brought to the forefront (surfaced) and made available to business users that need access
in a secure, simple and easy to
consume platform. SharePoint is the place to surface data from disparate silos of information. From Line of Business (LOB) systems, File Shares, Legacy systems (including The Big Three – FileNet (IBM), Documentum (EMC) and Open Text) and even from other SharePoint systems.
Many organizations today face the problem of having critical business data locked in siloed legacy systems. Critical business data often is stored in disparate systems. We can resolve this problem by quickly connecting your LOB systems to SharePoint. Workers from across the organization can use a single interface to access appropriate data more quickly and easily, helping to increase the ROI of legacy systems and decrease the need for training. In addition, the native application development capabilities of SharePoint can help your legacy solutions to do more.
A primary interoperability component of SharePoint Server, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is responsible for reading from and writing to external systems. BCS in SharePoint Server enables connectivity to external data sources, such as databases and LOB systems. With the BCS set of components, external lists can provide full CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) capabilities to data stored in any system that can be connected to SharePoint Server. To users, an external list looks and feels almost exactly like any other SharePoint Server list: They can create new views, easily sort and filter data, and even take data offline using Microsoft Outlook.