Business Data Catalog (BDC) for the Power User – List Columns

Suppose, in a Document Library I was creating Proposals, Invoices, Credit Notes, Purchase orders etc. Against all of these documents, it would be useful to store the Company Name, City, Telephone Number etc so that should I want to chase an invoice, or follow up a proposal the information is at hand, and I don't have to go looking for it in my CRM application. So using a Lightning Tools sample Database as an example, I would like to show you how to create columns that use BDC data:

1. Navigate to your Team Site where you would like to try this out.
2. Create a new document library by choosing Site Actions, Create (Site Actions, View all Site Content, Create if you have publishing switched on).
3. Choose the Document Library Template
4. Name the Document Library 'Sales Documents'
5. Accept the defaults and click Create.
6. Choose Settings, Document Library Settings
7. Under the Columns section click Create Column
8. Name the Column Company
9. Choose Business Data as the Type.
10. In the Type field, click the address book icon.
11. Choose the Entity that contains your customer data
12. Select the column that contains the data you would like to store
13. Check the columns you would like to display
14. Click OK.
15. Using the BreadCrumb trail choose the Sales documents link.
16. Click New, to create a new document
17. The Document Information Panel will display (Office 2007 required).
18. Type a customer ID in the CustomerID column, and you will see the other information from BDC returned.
19. Save and Close Word.
20. Notice in the Document Library, that the Meta Data is displayed in the default view and can be filtered/sorted etc.

This Article was published by : Brett Lonsdale (Director – Lightning Tools Ltd) Http://sharepoint.microsoft.com