Business Data Catalog (BDC) - of SharePoint 2007 allows to present data from non SharePoint system on SharePoint UI. Not only display, BDC can also crawl and index data!

We use BDC to extract data from MS CRM database (using API, direct database access or web service) and display on SharePoint Site using out of the box business data web parts shipped along with BDC. SharePoint Designer is then used to edit XSL of BDC web parts as needed for rich formatting.

Combination of BDC and SharePoint Designer allows us to cater MS CRM Data in customized style and format as required by our customers.

Background

After my initial end user introduction to CRM, I found that CRM provides great User Interface customization and you may know about this. You can add tabs, sections, IFRAME, fields so that you're not bound to displaying a field at a specific place in a form.

In particular, IFRAME is great as any external page can be presented in it without browsing elsewhere or opening a new window, and SharePoint page is no exception. After providing URL to SharePoint site for an IFRAME, I realized that some of UI components on SharePoint page distract users. For example, SharePoint's top n ...