Chapter 1. Introducing the Business Data Catalog
This chapter covers
- Remembering life before the Business Data Catalog (BDC)
- Defining BDC
- Understanding BDC architecture
- Connecting with data sources
- Surfacing business data in SharePoint
One problem that organizations face today is that they’re surrounded by islands of data. By this, we mean that organizations have many different applications, databases, and spreadsheets, perhaps on different servers and within different departments. These applications are often isolated from one another and quite often duplicate data. Having all of these islands of data makes it difficult and time-consuming to see the big picture on how the organization is progressing. And even in a small- to medium-sized company, it means that obtaining the information in a report format is time-consuming, and that information is usually out of date by the time it reaches management. This problem arises with the natural growth of a company, and no matter how much effort you put into planning the systems and communicating with other departments, one application often will just not work for the entire organization.