The success of any organization is the smart use of the information to which the organization has access, whether or not they know this information is available. Unfortunately, traditional networking technologies have provided the foundation for dispersing both the creation and hosting of mission critical information without providing methods to aggregate and organize this information.
Microsoft's first stab at organizing disconnected data islands was the Information Bridge Framework (IBF). The goal was to make the right information available to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decisions. This “right time, right info, right people, right decision” has become a cliche' that many of us have heard, yet it does help us understand what needs to take place.
Note that having information at your fingertips does not ensure that you'll be successful. Brilliant people have had the right information at their fingertips and yet made massively wrong decisions based on that information. Instead, what we need to understand is that there is an information process that we all live in that goes something like this: data -->information-->knowledge-->understanding. The latter two cannot be achieved through software. The highest service that software can provide is the aggregation and organization of data that melds into information. Thereafter, humans must take the information, invest time and energy into understanding that information, then make good decisions based on that information. Knowledge and understanding are human efforts. When working with the SharePoint technologies, don't assume the software will take your client or organization into a state of understanding. SharePoint cannot do this. No software can.
The IBF was built to bridge the gap (hence the name) between the larger, back-end systems that were used to create and host large amounts of mission-critical information and the desktop applications, such as Word or Excel, that users who consumed this information used on a daily basis. It was during the IBF era when Microsoft coined the term Information Worker, to help us conceptualize their thinking about the desktop user. IOW, the desktop user was not merely a person using a few Microsoft applications, but was often a person who needed important information at the right time to make significant decisions based on that information.
The IBF contained both server and client components. Among the client components, the more important two were an administration tool and hyperlink support (such as smart tags and hyperlinks that invoked the ibf protocol handler). There was also a Metadata Designer to help design the metadata needed for the connections to the information.
The IBF worked with Office 2003 and InfoPath 2003. With the advent of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the IBF was updated and then baked into the product and called the Business Data Catalog. The BDC is Microsoft’s strategic integration technology, and they plan to expand BDC further. By using the BDC, an organization can accomplish the following objectives:
· Reduce or eliminate the code required to access Line-of-Business (LOB) systems.
· Achieve deeper integration of data into places where a user works.
· Centralize deployment of data source definitions. An organization typically will not define all the data it uses, only the most important data in the BDC.
· Reduce latency to data, because once a data source is defined in the BDC it will be immediately available on the Web farm.
· Centralize data security auditing and connections.
· Perform structured data searches.
The BDC is a shared service in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and uses ADO.NET, OLEDB, or ODBC drivers to connect to practically all popular databases, and it can also use Web services to connect to business applications that support that method of retrieving data. The data is presented in a list or web part using SharePoint Server 2007.
LOBi (Line of Business Interoperability) is the next generation of the BDC and Microsoft announced LOBi (pronounced “lobby”) at TechEd 2006 in Boston. LOBi for SharePoint Server is a future set of capabilities that will work together with Microsoft Office client applications and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Note that the focus on LOBi will be on Interoperability, not just presentation and massaging off information we pull out of a LOB system.
Be on the lookout for LOBi content and product information in the coming months from Microsoft. While the BDC will be very useful for the foreseeable future, I think we’ll be learning that the tools provided with LOBi will be even more useful.
Bill English
Mindsharp