All posts tagged BCS

SharePoint Fest Denver

I am blogging to you right now from Denver, Colorado where I have had the honour of speaking at the SharePoint Fest conference there.  I also was speaking at the SharePoint Fest conference in Washington, DC where I received some good constructive feedback.  With that in mind I completely revamped my slide deck and approach to the presentation.  I am just writing this post after the first session with the revised deck.  It went awesome.  I had a great group of people in my session and a packed room.  I think the slides revamp was great.  Thanks SharePoint Fest DC!!

You can access my new slides here:

Playing Outside Your Sandbox. Interacting with other systems using SharePoint BCS

Playing Further Outside Your Sandbox-Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS

 

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Playing Further Outside Your Sandbox: Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS – Slide Deck

Hi everyone,

On October 20, 2016 I had the honour of taking part in the Collab365 Global Conference.  At this conference I presented my session on Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS.  I forgot to provide the slide deck to the Collab365 team prior to the conference.  I have posted the slide deck here.

Playing Further Outside Your Sandbox: Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS slide deck.

 

Prepare an Azure Database for SharePoint Online BCS Connection

While working on the demos for a resent presentation I wanted to research some steps on how to prepare an Azure database for Sharepoint Online BCS connection with SharePoint Online.  I found that there was no complete answer in one place so decided to make one… hence this post.  This post assumes you already have an Azure account and necessary rights to configure it.  It also assumes you do not have any DB’s in your Azure environment.  Also note, adding Azure DBs to your environment is not a free service and you will have costs added to your monthly invoice.

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How to Setup SharePoint Search to Crawl External Content With BCS

So the other day I wrote about an error received when your security is not setup properly when configuring search for external data using Business Connectivity Services.  I thought today would be a good day to show you how to setup SharePoint search to crawl external content with BCS.  Setting up search isn’t actually too hard once the ECT is there.  What people initially forget though is setting up the profile page.  This is what tells SharePoint how to display the data to you.  If you don’t setup profiles here is what things look like:

BCS Search With No Profile Configured

We can see from the link details that it is coming from the BDC (Business Data Connectivity).  That’s the service in SharePoint that houses BCS.  Clicking on the link just takes us back to the search center.  This is because SharePoint doesn’t know how to display the data to us.

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SharePoint Search – Error While Crawling LOB Contents

Recently I was configuring search to access my SQL Server data via an external content type for a demo I was presenting.  Once the content source was configured I ran the full crawl to populate the index with the data from my external source.  After about a minute the crawl was marked complete.  So naturally I am going to want to test it and make sure my data is pulling through.  The external data is a basic asset database so I did a search for one of the manufacturers I knew was in there.  Received the dreaded “Nothing here matches your search” message.

SearchNoData

Well I know there is data in there so obviously something went wrong.  I know what is wrong as I have done this before, but I want to go through some of the troubleshooting steps you can do to help determine the problem.

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