The ability to access external business data into the familiar portal environment is one of the key features of SharePoint 2010. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allows developers and administrators to define how SharePoint connects to external entities and create instances of lists which are used to interact with the external data.
When users require access to business data from external systems you can use PowerShell to import the BCS model. This approach simplifies the required setup involved in manual configuration across multiple environments.
Alternatively, when troubleshooting an existing environment with existing BCS connections established, creating a replica of that environment is crucial to be able to reproduce issues reported by users. In this chapter, we'll take a look at how you can export an already defined BCS model to be used in your sandbox environment.
When exposing external data to business users, you will require to create instances of external lists...