Here’s a Reminder about SharePoint’s Power and Potential (Via Stephen E. Arnold)

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It has been awhile since we found a suitable SharePoint graphic that met out high standards, but we found one from the MSDN SharePoint Developer Team Blog in the article, “Business Connectivity Services High-Level Architecture in SharePoint.”

What we discovered is that Business Connectivity Services (BCS) was first introduced in SharePoint 2007 as the Business Data Catalog (the two products do build upon the other for those worried about updates and patches). It allows SharePoint to connect with all kinds of external data sources, including CRM and ERP databases.

“BCS provides a developer with a means of pre-defining all the information needed by an application to connect with and manipulate this external data through External Content Types (ECT). The most important aspect of ECTs is that once the developer creates it, the ECT will be available for use by SharePoint users to connect and use the external systems without knowing any code.”

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New Study Proves SharePoint Is Becoming a Business-Critical Application

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Some business applications come and go without having much impact on the actual daily processes of transactions, sales, marketing, consulting, or whatever a business happens to do. Others are highly critical, and the moment one of them is unavailable or inaccessible, the business becomes well aware of its impact.

Because a business-critical application can have a far-reaching impact on the success or failure of a business, it is extremely important to have something reliable, something that is durable enough to withstand the highs and lows a business may experience.

A new white paper offered by Metalogix, Managing SharePoint as a Business-critical Application, highlights a study by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) of the many of the reasons Microsoft SharePoint has become a business-critical application for numerous organizations and how it will increasingly become more of a mainstay in the business world. This ubiquity will make businesses better, but it will also require them to adapt and develop new ways of thinking about business collaboration.

51 percent of businesses consider SharePoint one of their top 5 applications, and a whopping 80 percent place it within the top 10. Over the next couple of years, 63 percent expect it to move into their top 5. More businesses are recognizing SharePoint as a critical application, one that is necessary to maintain a consistent flow of data and keep up performance levels.

Part of the reason for this recognition is that businesses have evolved and changed the ways in which employees interact with one another. You may go an entire day without someone dropping a file folder on your desk, but you may get emails from multiple colleagues, each with attached documents. File sharing, document management, and centralized storage are all tools businesses need and ones SharePoint delivers.

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