Last evening I presented at the SharePoint User Group UK meeting in Leeds, Yorkshire. My presentation was on Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online (Office 365). There was a great turn out of around 20 attendees plus organizers, and it was held in a very nice Edwardian pub called The Adelphi.
I kicked off the evening with a high level overview of Business Connectivity Services and what is provided with the different licenses of Office 365. This led into a demonstration of External Lists, Business Data Web Parts, the External Data Column, and Profile Page creation.
We then dived into the connectivity where I demonstrated creating an OData end point using Visual Studio with a WCF Data Service and ADO.NET Entity Data Model. We consumed the OData service in a SharePoint 2013 app and deployed it to SharePoint Online as an External Content Type.
We moved onto SharePoint Designer 2013 and created an External Content Type to connect to an SQL database hosted in Azure. This included the setting up of Secure Store to handle the authentication.
Finally, I demonstrated that you could also import a BDCM file which in turn allows for the configuration of External Data through Sites in your Office 365 tennant.
My slides can be seen here:
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