Roles and Development Life Cycle

  • Article

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

This topic describes the roles involved and the development life cycle typically followed when you can create solutions by using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to integrate external data into Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Office 2010 applications, and custom applications.

Roles: How Should You Work with BCS?

The way you work with Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) depends upon your role. The following diagram shows a high-level view of the roles that are involved with Business Connectivity Services and the development life cycle.

Roles high-level view

Development Life Cycle

  • Business analysts, who understand business systems and the overall business processes in the enterprise, identify a relevant scenario and solution scope. They identify the business entities that users must access from Office applications, from SharePoint sites, and from custom applications. Then, they communicate the requirements to business managers, developers, site designers, and IT administrators.

  • Site designers, with approval from IT administrators and input from business analysts, build the overall SharePoint site structure required for the scenario. This structure is composed of pages that can have customized themes.

  • IT administrators manage user access and security for the sites.

  • Developers create reusable Business Connectivity Services components such as External Content Types, custom External Data Parts, and code actions. In addition, developers create other customized components including Web Parts, templates, forms, workflows, and field types.

  • IT administrators review these reusable Business Connectivity Services components and, if approved, put them in a central location. They also determine and control permissions for access to these components.

  • Information workers create their own simple solutions by using native capabilities of Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint, and Office.

  • Experienced or "power" users and developers create intermediate declarative solutions by using the rich feature set provided by Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint, and Office, and the reusable Business Connectivity Services components that developers have created.

  • Advanced developers use the Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint, and Office object models to create rich and complex solutions that require coding. IT administrators deploy these solutions and control access.

See Also

Concepts

Creating Intermediate Declarative Outlook Solutions Using Business Connectivity Services

Creating Advanced Code-Based Solutions Using Business Connectivity Services

Other Resources

Code Snippets: Creating BCS Reusable Code Components

Creating Simple Solutions Using Business Connectivity Services

Creating Intermediate Declarative Solutions Using Business Connectivity Services