Pro SharePoint 2010 Cloud-Based Business Connectivity Services is a practical, real-world guide to using SharePoint's BCS platform in the cloud to connect to your business applications, surface the data, and harness the power of SharePoint to deliver meaningful results. With Business Connectivity Services, you can find, extract and slice and dice data from any application or database and present it in useful and easily customizable reports for a variety of audiences. Microsoft has extended the capabilities of BCS to operate in cloud-based instances of SharePoint 2010, meaning you can now tap the full potential of BCS in hosted environments, allowing for low licensing costs, incredible elasticity of scale, and rapid deployment. The only book on the market to dedicate its coverage of BCS to the cloud using Microsoft's hosted offerings and other providers' hosted, multitenant solutions, Pro SharePoint 2010 Cloud-Based Business Connectivity Services takes you through understanding, building, modifying, and deploying highly useful and attractive cloud-based BCS applications to your audience.
Author Fabian Williams, a premier SharePoint solutions architect, shows you inside how to: * create coded and no-code cloud solutions with BCS * understand real-world scenarios and BCS applications * build solutions with SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, SQL Azure, and more. What you'll learn * Learn how to use SharePoint 2010 to create cloud-based, scalable applications * Grasp how SharePoint's Business Connectivity Services feature has unfolded from an on-premise utility to a first-class cloud citizen * Avoid typical traps in developing in the cloud * Discover new ways to use SharePoint Designer Enterprise Data Solutions to surface business data * Build your own consumable data services * Expand your development using WCF and Visual Studio solutions * Integrate SQL Azure for cloud-based database connectivity And much more. Who this book is for Pro SharePoint 2010 Cloud-Based Business Connectivity Services is aimed at the business analyst, developer, and solutions architect. Anyone who works with SharePoint or develops business processes and uses business data can use this book, however, as a learning aid and reference guide.