a payglobal presentation donald harman. overview intro investigate the bdc business data catalogue...

A PAYGLOBAL PRESENTATION Donald Harman

Overview Intro

Investigate the BDC Business Data Catalogue

Business Data Catalogue investigation

Case to use for proof of concept.

Search through another business system i.e. Pivotal using the BDC and Enterprise Search of MOSS 2007

Face business data in another manner than the Pivotal UI

Issues and development steps.

Why did I choose this method rather than a report?

Issues in Pivotal

Issues within Pivotal – You need to know the number or description name, then once you have issue you can then click on individual development steps to “walk through” the steps of where this Issue is at

So what’s my point?

Make issues easier to search.

Learn more about the data and use it better.

Can we capture this data better and improve our information.

Why go there?

The pain

• Microsoft Business Data Catalogue

• BDC Meta Man

• And the winner was….

BDC tools I looked at

Source PMP Research

BDC Metaman

SharePoint did not like Binary ID’s

The BDC Metaman definition file is an XML file within this file I was able to manipulate the SQL query part of the file. Whenever I had a BinaryID I cast it as an Integer

CAST ([Issue_Id] as Int) AS [Issue_Id]

I was well pleased with this as I was able to successfully import the definition.

But there was more I also had to change the type descriptors as well

<TypeDescriptor TypeName="System.Int32" Name="Issue_Id" IdentifierName="[Issue_Id]" />

MOSS now liked the file. I ended up using filters which you can set up with the tool.

A little of SQL knowledge helps

Filtering…

Import the file

Lock and load.

The Tables are now entities witha relationship to the development steps

The Entities

Add Content Source

Add the content to be crawled

SharedServices > Search Settings > Content Sources

One I have previously prepared

Add them web parts

Search – am html part which sends me to the Issues page

<DIV onkeydown="JavaScript:if(event.keyCode==13) SubmitGoogleSearch();" noWrap><A href="http://pgl-80/SearchCenter/Pages/Issues.aspx" target=_blank></A><INPUT id=q maxLength=254 size=24><IMG onmouseup="this.src='/_layouts/images/icongo02.gif'" onmousedown="this.src='/_layouts/images/icongo03.gif'" onmouseover="this.src='/_layouts/images/icongo02.gif'" style="CURSOR: hand" accessKey=s onclick=JavaScript:SubmitGoogleSearch(); onmouseout="this.src='/_layouts/images/icongo01.gif'" alt="Execute search" src="http://pgl-80:4586/_layouts/images/icongo01.gif" align=absMiddle border=0><INPUT id=newPage type=checkbox>New</DIV>

The parts

The Issue list

The Issue Part

now viewed by severity + visual conditional formatting

The Issue Part

Set up filtering and conditional formatting

SharePoint Designer

Issues Search results

Search page

Click through to the Issue plus more

See the development steps as well…

Might get the BDC tool in the next budget!

Conclusion:

Some folk were way impressed.

Some folk still want to view stuff in a spreadsheet.

Still got many battles to win.

Next step is presenting a business case for other benefits.

Perhaps a dashboard of Search results from different systems.

Documentation – Development – Finance Lists that can grab data from different areas and use shared lists rather than siloed spreadsheets

Some wins so far with MOSS

Past success

Success in progress

Early adopter

That’s all folks

Thanks for listening.