What's new in Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint
Learn about changes and new features in Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for SharePoint, including enhanced support for REST, OData, external events, and app-scoped external content types. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) was introduced in SharePoint 2010 as an improvement to the Business Data Catalog created for Office SharePoint Server 2007. BCS enables SharePoint to access data from external data systems such as SAP, ERP, and CRM, in addition to other data-driven applications that are exposed through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services or Open Data (OData) endpoints.
New features and functionality in Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint
BCS is improved and enhanced for SharePoint, including the new functionality listed in Table 1.
Table 1. What's new in BCS
| New feature | For more information |
|---|---|
| SharePoint can now connect to OData sources. |
Using OData sources with Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint |
| SharePoint can receive events from external systems. |
External events and alerts in SharePoint |
| External content types can now be scoped at the application level. |
Add-in-scoped external content types in SharePoint |
| Support for Representational State Transfer (REST) and the client object model is enhanced. |
Get started using the client object model with external data in SharePoint |