Business Connectivity Services Office Item Type

In this walkthrough we will show how to sync our Employees information from our External System and a Contacts list within Outlook 2013 via an External List. We will consider an example for MS SQL but the same way you may work with any other data source supported by Meta Man.

Prerequisites:
- SharePoint Server 2013
- Meta Man (it doesn’t necessarily need to be installed on the SharePoint server but it requires .net Framework 4.5 installed on the machine where you are going to run Meta Man from)
- MS SQL server with any sample database (for this walk through we are going to use the NorthWind sample database )
- A table with contact information that will be synced with Outlook
Open Meta Man and choose to connect to a SQL Server data source. Select or enter the database name you wish to work with and press arrow in order to connect to selected database.
Upon successfully connecting to SQL Server you’ll see another window. In order to get a list of tables click “Tables” item in the list on the left pane. Now we can see listed all the tables for this particular database.
We create an external content type by dragging and dropping a table onto our design surface which is the large area on the right side. We will be working with the “Employees” table, to add it to the model , just drag it onto the “Diagram”.
When you drop the table you will be shown the following dialog, which allows to configure the external content type before creation. You may modify the external content type name, change identifier and add the methods to the external content type. In this example we’ll accept all default values and click “Create” button.
You should have the following External Content Type on your Diagram
To edit the created External Content Type right-click on it on the design surface and choose “Configure Entity” menu item.
Change the “Office Item Type” from “Generic List” to “Contact”
Change to the “Methods” Tab
Click on the “Specific Finder Method” and on any field, you will see we have a warning telling us that we need to map some required fields
Click on the “Title” field, and then set it’s Office Item Type Mapping to “Title”, click “Save”
Repeat this process for the “Full Name” , “Last Name”, “Home Address” and “Home Telephone Number” office properties, mapping appropriate fields to them.
When you have finished, click “Update” button
Now we need to deploy our BDC model. First we need to set URL of where you want to deploy your model. We set this URL by going “Settings” from the title bar.
In the model deployment URL textbox you should manually type URL of SharePoint 2013 Central Administration . Click “Save” button.
Once you have saved the URL to deploy your BDC model file to simply click “Deploy” button and your BDC model file will get deployed.
SharePoint 2013 will now go through and validate your BDC model file is correct, once it is done you will get a success dialog
Browse to the site where you want to add the External List. Click “Site Contents”->”add an app”.
Select “External List”
Enter a name for External list and click on the icon to show the available External Content Types
Select our generated Northwind_MetaMan.Employees External Content Type, click “OK”
Click “Create”
We should now have an External List showing our Employees data from MS SQL database.
Make sure that you have enabled “Offline Synchronization for External Lists” feature in SharePoint 2013 before you can do a Sync with Outlook 2013. Go to Site Features and enable this feature if it’s deactivated.
Click on “List” on the Ribbon and then click on the “Connect to Outlook” button
After a short while a dialog box will pop-up asking you to install, Click “Install”
Once the installation has been completed you can click “Close”
Open Outlook, you will have a section called “SharePoint External Lists”, within this section you will have our “Employees” contacts
When you click on this list you will see all of our Employees contacts are synced with Outlook