Business Data Catalog: unwrapping line-of-business data

One element of the upcoming version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007, for all you Microsoft acronym junkies) that is almost guaranteed to be transformative to many businesses is the Business Data Catalog.  Wikis and blogs will add to the “cool” factor, but to business users, the benefits of the BDC could be most dramatic and long-ranging.

The Business Data Catalog, or BDC, is an element of MOSS that allows for easy creation and management of web parts to query data in line-of-business systems in real time using XML.  If you’re a business person and not a geek, that means that data from your ERP, CRM, customer service and support systems, or other databases or web services can be easily, intelligently, and securely served up to users in a SharePoint wrapper without writing great gobs of code or waiting for a periodic “refresh” 

The main features that interest me are:

·         out-of-the-box web parts (Business Data SharePoint Lists and Web Parts) for displaying lists of data from line-of-business systems, modifying views of these lists, and displaying related records (e.g., pulling up a customer record in one web part, then displaying the related account management team in another automatically)

·         out-of-the-box actions (Business Data Actions) that can be created to allow users to perform actions on data from the BDC (e.g., go to a URL for more information about a customer, open a new service call in the line-of-business application, open an InfoPath form to start a new business process such as a new project for an existing customer)

·         new Enterprise Search capabilities of MOSS extended to this line-of-business data.  Think about being able to search for every instance of your interaction with a customer (sales, support, billing, service, contracts, etc.), across data sources, via SharePoint...

Pay attention to the BDC if you’re planning on attending any Office 2007 readiness events or upcoming Collaboration Summit events, and see me for more information about any of these events…