Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By : Adrian Colquhoun
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By: Adrian Colquhoun

Overview of this book

The power of Microsoft SharePoint as the Enterprise collaboration platform is ever-growing; due to the wide range of capabilities it offers, SharePoint 2010 can help transform your business so you can quickly respond to the changes and challenges that you face. For End Users, SharePoint helps you and your team work "better, faster, and smarter". This book will take your SharePoint knowledge further, showing you how to use your skills to solve real business problems. While many other titles might be characterized as "SharePoint Explained", this cookbook contains advanced content that goes beyond that found in other SharePoint End User offerings: it is "SharePoint Applied". It provides recipes walking Power Users through a range of collaboration, data integration, business intelligence, electronic form, and workflow scenarios, as well as offering three invaluable business scenarios for building composite applications. The cookbook begins by providing a comprehensive treatment of SharePoint essentials, while quickly moving forward to topics like Data Integration, Business Intelligence, and automating business processes. At the end of the book, the information presented in the earlier recipes is combined to create three example SharePoint 2010 "composite applications" for Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Project Management. Composite applications are the "unique selling point" of SharePoint 2010 and understanding how to create them is the key to unlocking the business value of the product.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating an external content type


An external content type is used to connect SharePoint columns and external lists to external data stored in databases, web services, and other systems. Creating external content types is the key to turning SharePoint into your organization's data hub.

Getting ready

This recipe works for:

  • SharePoint 2010 Foundation

  • SharePoint 2010 Standard Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition

  • Office 365 (SharePoint Online)

You will need the Full Control permission level to run this recipe.

You will need connection details for an external data source that you wish to connect to. This recipe uses the Adventures sample database for illustration. You can download the AdventureWorks database from – http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109

You will need a SharePoint site where you wish to define the external content type.

How to do it...

  1. Open your site using SharePoint Designer. From the Navigation pane click on External Content Types.

  2. The External Content Types ribbon...