We’re excited to announce that Penelope Coventry’s Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step (ISBN 9780735627338; 592 pages) is now available for purchase!   You can find the book’s introduction in this previous post . In today’s post, please enjoy an excerpt from Chapter 7, “Using Business Connectivity Services,” which describes what BCS is. We also include an exercise that shows you how to create an Office application external content type (ECT). Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduced functionality that allows companies to present data from backend applications on Web pages and as column values in lists and libraries. The Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS), originally called the Business Data Catalog, was one component of this functionality and is now Read More...