Provision Business Connectivity Services

The Business Connectivity Services Service (BCS Service) in SharePoint 2010 is a new and improved version of the Business Data Catalog that we had in SharePoint 2007. There are many improvements from the older version, and one of the biggest improvements is that we now have read and write access to our backend data sources. Perhaps one of the greatest “feature improvements,” however, is that the BCS Service comes as part of SharePoint Foundation, thereby opening up its capabilities to a much broader audience.

Compared to the other Service Applications we've looked at in this chapter, the provisioning of the BCS Service is perhaps the easiest and most straightforward as there are essentially no additional steps to complete beyond the creation of the Service Application. The following list includes the steps that you will need to perform to provision the BCS Service: