In the second of several posts regarding SharePoint development and integration with other systems and how you can make consolidate points of entry in your business applications I will discuss connecting BDC connections into SharePoint Lists.  Connection BDC objects into SharePoint lists or document libraries allows you to associate busineed objects in other systems to information or documents within SharePoint.  As the Line of Business Object (LOB) changes in the other system SharePoint is updated with the information as well.  <!--more-->

One of the most useful examples and the one I will use in this walkthrough is association documents to CRM server database (doesn't matter which one as long as there is access to the data) Accounts.  This allows you to quickly create a searchable dashboard of Company documents without having to manage two seperate lists of accounts.  You can provide information on the accounts, project server information, and related documents all in dashboard while still maintaining a single "master list" of accounts and details.

To do this we start by creating our BDC connection.  I will skip over this step as it has been covered in the previous BDC post located here <a href="http://blogs.egroup.jasonmangone.com/?p=1357">http://blogs.egroup.jasonmangone.com/?p=1357</a>.  After you BDC has been created and imported into SharePoint server you can start to create your custom dashboard.

Our Custom dashboard will have 3 areas.  A list of Accounts, a detailed Account information window and a document library.  Now that we have a BDC connected list of accounts pulling from our CRM system we can configure the linking of the web parts and the document library.
<ol>
	<li>Edit your document library and add a column</li>
	<li>Select the column to be business data (requires Enterprise features to be enabled on Site Collection and Site)</li>
	<li>Select the field (usually "Account Name") you want the column to contain from your BDC list</li>
	<li>Add the field.</li>
</ol>
Now you have a BDC driven column in which you can associate documents to BDC driven Accounts.  The next step is to link the web parts.  This is easy...
<ol>
	<li>Select the web part account list to publish information to the Document library and specify the field.</li>
</ol>
Radio buttons will now be a part of your list.  As you select these radio buttons the document library will filter to the documents for the selected account.  You now have a CRM integrated searchable SharePoint document library.

For more detailed instructions watch this video that demonstrates the process step by step:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITPHd5BmRaM&amp;w=320&amp;h=240]

(Thanks to Youtube presenter 'akalli' for the great demonstration!)