Surfacing External data into SharePoint and Office365. A look at how to surface and modify the data from SQLServer, OData, DocumentDB, Azure Tables and other data types of storage from Sharepoint, Office365 and Local Office products.

1. Welcome
Surfacing External Data in
SharePoint & Office 365
Pushkar Chivate

2. My Background
 Senior SharePoint and Web developer /
Application Architect

3. Agenda
- What is Business Connectivity Service
- Why use Business Connectivity Service
- Using Business Connectivity Service for external data
- .Net assemblies
- WCF Service
- SQL Server Connection
- Overview & Demo of various external data sources
- SQL Server
- Azure Tables,
- DocumentDB

4. BCS Solutions
- On-Premises Solution
The SharePoint farm and the external system are both behind a
company’s firewall
- Cloud Only Solution
SharePoint Online site accessing data from an external data
source
- Hybrid Solution

5. BCS Components

6. Prerequisite software needed to work with
external data in Office 2013
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.x
WCF Data Services 5.0 for OData V3
Download it from:
https://support.office.com/en-us/Article/Prerequisite-software-needed-to-
work-with-external-data-in-Office-2013-cc974b82-7a2e-4889-9a7b-
b0328fc5d1ca

7. Business Services Connectivity
Authentication Models
- Impersonation and Delegation
 Per-user authorization
 To enable auditing at the back-end server
- Trusted Subsystem
 Access to one account.
 It offers connection pooling.
 It reduces licensing costs on the back-end server.
 It is less complex.

8. Business Services Connectivity Authentication
Authentication Modes
- PassThrough
- RevertToSelf

9. Why use Business Connectivity Services?
- Centralized infrastructure
- Managed authentication
- Search external content
Alternatives to BCS?
- Java script-based solutions
- Custom data connections
- Custom-coded Web Parts

10. Using External Data in SharePoint
Demo

11. Azure ApiApps, Azure Storage
&
SharePoint External Data
A look at storage features that Azure offers…

12. Data Storage
Various data storage techniques
 SQL Azure
 Azure Table
 Blob storage
 Document DB

13. Azure Tables
What are Azure Tables?
 Non relational entities (not RDBMS).
 Tables are nothing but collection of entities
 Entities are comprised of properties
 Properties are name value pairs

14. Azure Table Entities
Azure Storage Account
Employees (Table)
Entity
Property
<Name,Value>
Entities
 Partition Key
 Row Key
 Timestamp
 … other properties
 Each entity can have different number
and type of properties
Partition Key + Row Key = Unique Identifier
(No support for secondary index in Azure Table)
Azure Storage Account
Entity
Property
Entity
Property
Property PropertyProperty
Azure Table

15. Azure Tables Partitions
Employees (Table) Certifications (Table)
(Entity)
EmployeeName=…
CertName=…
BirthDate=…
CertNumber=…
EmployeeName=…
CertName=…
BirthDate=…
CertNumber=…
FavoriteTeam=…
(Entity)
CertName=…
EmployeeName=…
CertNumber=…
BirthDate=…
CertName=…
EmployeeName=…
CertNumber=…
BirthDate=…
PK = EmployeeName
RK = CertName
PK = CertName
RK = EmployeeName
How do you Partition the data?
• EmployeeName or CertName?

16. Azure Tables
EmployeeName BirthDate FavoriteTeam
David Anderson 1/1/1970
Nancy Wilson 4/15/1965 Atlanta Falcons
John Doe April 1, 1989
No Fixed Schema for entities
Employee table

17. Azure Tables
Summary
 No nice relational schema model that we get in RDBMS
 Easy to work with
 Built to scale
 Great pricing!!

18. DocumentDB
• Azure Document DB - relatively new service
• It’s fully managed Document database as a service
• It stores the data in JSON
• The Azure Tables are extremely scalable and cheap, but if you start querying
on any other attributes then you start running into problems.
• It’s massively scalable but fully query-able by all parts of JSON tree.
• Capacity units are 10GB in size.

19. DocumentDB

20. Surfacing DocumentDB data into SharePoint
Demo

21. Recap
We Looked at…
- Business Connectivity Services
- How to surface external data into SharePoint
- We looked at retrieving external data from various sources
such as -
- SQL Server,
- .Net Assemblies
- DocumentDB

22. References
- Technet, MSDN
- azure.microsoft.com (Learning videos and documentation)
- Youtube, Channel9 and other internet sites