Now for the title - for those of you who don't know IBF (Information Bridge Framework) - here's a quick summary:
IBF is a new solution that provides a standardised way for developers to integrate data from enterprise applications (CRM,HR, ERP,...) into Office. IBF is an example of a service oriented architecture in which your LOB applications are connected to Office through a webservices layer. At the clientside IBF leverages the smart tag and smart document functionality of Office 2003 Professional. (More about IBF)
Now, it seems that Microsoft will offer a rock-solid alternative in the new Office Servers (... details are still very sketchy), which is called the Business Data Catalog (BDC). BDC is a repository for metadata about LOB datasources and their corresponding business entities. All this metadata is defined in XML format. BDC seems to use analogous terminology as IBF:
IBF defines both UI and business data in XML format and this made it fairly complex with lots of XML metadata definitions, XSLT transformations, etc... IBF was mainly targeted at Office as a client. BDC can be used from all kinds of applications through the API that they define for it. SharePoint already provides a UI out of the box with the 2 new webparts and is seems to integrate very well. By the way, Jonah finished off with a nice demo of connecting to SAP.... pretty need.
Same remark though as for the other sessions, details are still sketchy how this product will positioned, ... it will not be part of WSS but probably one of the new Office Servers... For more details check out this posting by Eli Robillard
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1 comment:
If you want BDC functionality in WSS 3.0 and MOSS standard edition you should look at MashPoint.
http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/mashpoint/archive/2008/06/02/mashpoint-how-does-it-work.aspx
/Jonas
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