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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 ot...
SharePoint Online
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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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