BCS, the successor to BDC & Office 2010

In SharePoint 2007, the BDC was a great way to read data from an external data source, show it in SharePoint as a list and let users view the data like that.
Of course, everybody was screaming for a possibility to write data back to that data source as well. I saw some companies building these kinds of functionalities and some of them worked very well but I'm afraid that with the new version of SharePoint, these companies will have to find an other way of making money.

In SharePoint 2010 you now have the BCS (Business Connectivity Services) which allow CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations to almost any external data source. You can now pull data from a source, show it in a regular SharePoint list and let users work with the data as if it was stored in SharePoint. Not only that but you can also then use this data in almost any Office 2010 client. The data will always be stored in the original, external data source but users can just keep using the tools they are so familiar with.
I saw quiet a few demos of this and was really blown away about what is possible, how well it worked and how far it can be extended to even work with the most weird backend systems.

Out of the box, these are the Office 2010 Clients that can do this: Word, Outlook, SharePoint Workspace (separate post on this blog) and InfoPath).

Office 2010 has this amazing new feature called co-authoring. When working on a document in SharePoint and connected to the server, you can see who is also working on this document. You can even see who is editing what part, you can see his presence information and you can even start a chat to ask him some more information about the part he edited. This was really amazing !!

In SharePoint 2007 you had the Excel services to work with Excel files right in the browser to some extent. This has improved and you now also have Access, Word, Project and Visio services.

You can now create small Access 'applications' and publish them to SharePoint. Everything will be converted so it is al stored in SharePoint and ready to work. In the past when a lot of people were connecting to a Access database, there was a good chance you would have some troubles. It just wasn't designed for that. Now that everything is stored and hosted by the SharePoint Server, these limitation are no more.

Microsoft promised a 100% accurate transformation of a Word document to its SharePoint equivalent. It's actually transforming it to ASPX pages. Very big files should be a problem.

For the Excel services there is a REST API, a Javascript object model and an updated Web Services API.

Extendability
As in every Office client, you have the backstage view. These are settings that don't really have a place in the ribbon interface because here, only the options for the current context are shown. The backstage view is a place where for example, the settings for that particular Office client are placed. The cool thing is that this backstage view is complete extendable. So maybe you document has links to other documents or certain tasks. You can for example show the status of these tasks and their overdue status in this backstage view.