BDC Web Man

Business Connectivity Services Workshops

Lightning Tools — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:03:19 GMT

As you may have heard the Business Data Catalog is being renamed to Business Connectivity Services for SharePoint 2010. As well as a name change there are also a lot of new features and functionality available to you to integrate your Line of Business systems with SharePoint.

Lightning Tools is offering a 3 day workshop to review your implementation of the Business Data Catalog, bring you up to speed on the Business Connectivity Services and finally plan a route of attack for upgrading and making use of the new functionality available to you.

Day 1

Review implementation of Business Data Catalog
Detail functionality utilized and where

Day 2

Presentations, demo's and walk-through's on Business Connectivity Services

Day 3

Plan how to utilize BCS new functionality
Upgrade considerations from existing BDC usage

Day 1 and Day 3 are based around a number of worksheets which will be completed during the days so you have information to refer to once the workshop is over.

This workshop is run onsite so you can get the maximum benefit from our BDC and BCS expertise.

To express an interest in this workshop and get more details please send an email to sales@lightningtools.com. We expect dates to fill up fast so if you are interested please let us know asap.

BDC Web Man 1.0.0.1 released

Lightning Tools — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:22:39 GMT

We’ve just released the new version of BDC Web Man. This is our tool that will generate WCF web services for you that you can easily integrate with the Business Data Catalog. Great if you are taking the web services/SOA route with SharePoint integration.

New in this version is the ability to connect to Oracle and generate web services…

and we’ve also improved the SQL Server functionality to now allow you to drag and drop SQL Views onto the design surface.

BDC Web Man is licensed the same way as BDC Meta Man, so you can configure the web methods for two entities and create an association between them to see exactly how things work. You can download the latest version from here:

http://www.lightningtools.com/bdc-web-man/default.aspx

BDC Web Man 1.0.0.0 released

Lightning Tools — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:56:28 GMT

Many organizations are going down the route of presenting their data to applications through a web service layer and returning a nice set of objects rather than developers having to query directly against a database and learn how to join tables together to get the entity they need. These applications include the Business Data Catalog.

If you are going to use a web service layer with the BDC, best practise is to build your web methods to work the same way as a Finder, SpecificFinder and IdEnumerator methods do that the BDC implements. Writing web methods and object classes for tables and views can be quite a tedious job – so through the things we’ve learned from building BDC Meta Man we’ve created a new application called BDC Web Man. This will take away all the hard work and save you many hours of coding by generating your web service project and all the classes and methods you need.

Check out the BDC Web Man page where we have links to 2 screencasts of the tool and the BDC in action. Download the trial and get using the BDC and web services in minutes.