PSUG Monthly Session, SharePoint Integration with Oracle

 

This Month’s Session for Palestinian SharePoint User Group was about SharePoint Integration With Oracle, and how  to use Business Connectivity Services in Order to use SharePoint as an interface for other types of external databases.

In SharePoint 2007, Business connectivity services was only reading data from Outer Databases such as Oracle and SQL, now in 2010 edition you can add and edit using SharePoint.

You can use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio for Business Connectivity , in VS using a third party named BDC Meta Man. by Connecting to the wanted Database, Configure permissions, tables and records wanted.

When Connection is done, an external content type is created, and external list will be created then to get data from that content type. then you can use the list as same as any other list in SharePoint (add, edit, delete, etc.) you also can set some rules such as cascading delete cases for example.

 

the most important limitation about external lists is that you CANNOT create a workflow on those.

You can also use SharePoint Powerful search engine to search content from external databases, set the rules of it and configure it and, we are done!. I loved the fact that some companies that have many software’s on different platforms  uses SharePoint Search engine because it can be attached to all those software’s databases and get results of all of them together.

 

 

Come Join us next time

 

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