Thats the Microsoft definition of the BDC (Business Data Catalog). WOWIE! That means you can interface any Line of Business application currently existing in your organisation with SharePoints, BDC – without coding! (for guys like me!)

It is a shared service (found in the SSP – Shared Services Provider) and it enables Office SharePoint Server 2007 to surface business data from back-end server applications without any coding. Business Data Catalog bridges the gap between the portal site and your business applications and enables you to bring in key data from various business applications to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications.

Has this got your mind thinking? Are you thinking of reports? dashboards? data manipulation and display, archiving, external read only interfacing of limited business data – eg. Suppliers/Distributors? I am sure this has got you thinking..

You can expand your business data into SharePoint as its interface with the following:

Web Parts – customised or out of the box.
SharePoint lists – showing business data in Word, Excel, tagging lists, tracking and extending data.
Business Data Actions – where we can write back to the Line of Business system. Eg. SAP
Search – enables crawling, indexing and perform powerful full text searches within SharePoint
User Profiles – update user profiles into your business application directly – SAP, Siebel etc.

All of the above with little or no coding! How easy is that?

Doesnt this sound great?
Read more about SharePoint BDC (MOSS Business Data Catalog) here..

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms563661.aspx