The Business Data Catalog (BDC) in SharePoint is a superb way of hooking up virtually any disparate system to SharePoint 2007. By defining the connection in to the system, you can expose any part of the system to SharePoint, and harness some of SharePoint’s real power – for example, its powerful search capabilities. Once you’ve created your connection (your Line Of Business [LOB] system), you can attach BDC columns to any list (e.g., document library) and you can, for example, have a document with a reference to your other system, so that you can permanently associate extra data to your document, without having to reproduce the information in SharePoint and create unnecessary duplication.
Using the BDC is beyond the scope of this post, but I’d like to cover an issue that I recently encountered when trying to work with the BDC and a document library. I had a fairly simple Visual Studio 2008 workflow that ran when a new item was created in the document library.
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