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paulpascha's avatar
paulpascha
Bronze Contributor
Mar 23, 2017

Future of BCS?

Hi all,

 

I am looking for opinions on the current state of BCS, primarily in SharePoint Online / O365 context. Would you still build solutions on it in green field scenarios or would you prefer other options instead? Is BCS actively maintained (it doesn't seem so if you ask me)? Are there any investments being made in the BCS space or is it fast becoming legacy technology?

 

 

SharePoint Online
sharepoint server

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  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Apr 14, 2017

    Thanks to those on this thread that gave me comments or questions relevant to my session at SPTechCon.  I posted my slides here https://www.slideshare.net/JeffFried/is-bcs-dead in case they are useful to you.

     

    To the “is BCS dead” question my basic conclusion is “it’s a zombie”.   It’s not deprecated (yet) and fine to use but there is no attention from Microsoft, no owner, and there are alternatives on the horizon.    There are forward-going alternatives you can smell for almost everything EXCEPT for search (indexing connectors), which of course is my main focus, so it’s an uncomfortable picture.

     

    I do see PowerApps with the OPDG as the future direction for many use cases (and FLow, PowerBI, and Azure Logic Apps, on the same gateway).   But there is no real equivalent of external columns now, nor of the Business data web parts, and a variety of other things where your choice is BCS, or Hybrid BCS (however clunky it is) or pretty extensive custom code.

     

     

  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Mar 30, 2017
    Spoiler
    BCS definitely seems to be in no-new-investment, and rare to see bug fixes.  I've had several folks on the product team confirm to me that nobody owns it anymore.

    I am doing a session on exactly this subject at SPTechCon next week.  
    (Wither BCS, alternatives etc)
    http://www.sptechcon.com/classes#BringingExternalContentintoSharePointisBCSdeadWhatsnext


    I'm pretty much set for this but if you guys have any suggestions of what you would like to see in this kind of session by all means let me know.
    • Drew Madelung's avatar
      Drew Madelung
      MVP
      Apr 02, 2017

      Great insights Jeff! It would be good to see your slides after the conference.

    • Eric Adler's avatar
      Eric Adler
      Steel Contributor
      Mar 30, 2017
      While I won't be there, it would be great to know if there are any opportunities to use the Enterprise Data Gateway (EDG) to make data available in SharePoint. Sounds like external content types are dead.

      How about other data connections utilizing the EDG? Maybe to an Excel file?

      Are their opportunities to leverage PowerApps or Flow with EDG & SPO?
  • jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
    jcgonzalezmartin
    MVP
    Mar 23, 2017
    IMHO, it seems no new investments coming to BCS...from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016 and in SPO, we have not seen anything new in regards of BCS. I think one of the paths to replace BCS could be PowerApps
    • JaredMatfess's avatar
      JaredMatfess
      Iron Contributor
      Mar 23, 2017

      I would agree with jcgonzalezmartin that there hasn't been any new investment to BCS. Where I still find it useful is if we are building a custom UI to connect to a non-SharePoint data source. PowerApps is definitely cool but there are some requirements that it can't meet just yet. For example, we've recently worked on a project where we connected to an Oracle Datanase using BCS and built an Angular application to perform CRUD operations and tie other list data to it. I don't believe there's an Oracle connector for PowerApps yet, though I'm sure there will be at some point. The nice think about BCS is it exposes tables as a SharePoint list and also allows you to access items via the REST API. So it really just depends on your requirements and what you need to connect to.

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