SharePoint & External Data

Today I ran into one of those little tasks that seem to grow from “I’ll whip it out before lunch” to “Lunch will be at 2 o'clock” before you realize what you’ve bitten off.

Someone asked if I could display a very simple list of data from our production database in our SharePoint intranet. This is a pretty straightforward request so I said sure, why not. And it would have been a five minute job were I running the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, it has all sorts of tools for pulling this off. Unfortunately this is using the free SharePoint Services.

With SharePoint Services it is a bit more buried that I thought it would be. Luckily I found an extremely easy to follow blog post from Ishai Sagi (SharePoint MVP) that walked me through setting it up.

Seriously, how did we ever manage to get anything done prior to the web?