SharePoint Designer allows us to connect to virtually every conceivable form of data store. Details of the data sources that SharePoint Designer can access are:
Business Data Catalog is a new feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server that allows us to create views of business data contained in back-end server applications (e.g. SAP or Siebel). This feature does not exist in WSS.
Database Connections allows us to connect to database servers on our network that use an SQL Server or OLE data provider.
Linked Sources is not so much a data source in its own right, rather a wizard that allows us to link existing data sources together and access the resulting views.
Server-side Scripts is a great way of easily updating RSS feeds.
SharePoint Libraries are a less conventional type of data stores in that they store documents and the information about those documents rather than being used to store data. These documents can be any type of file (e.g. Word documents) but can also take the...