Excerpt from: iTechnologyDesign
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| April 21, 2009 | | Tools for a Dynamic Data Driven SharePoint Site | Here are a couple tools that I have had the chance to play with and have found to be useful for surfacing external data into SharePoint.
The first tool I want to mention is the Data Viewer Web Part from Lightning Tools. If there was such a thing as a "magic bullet" for delivering line of business data from a given database to a SharePoint page, this web part is that magic bullet. What makes this tool so powerful is that it can be implemented without creating a business data catalog, and it does not require the "developer" to use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio for implementation. The web part can be configured through the SharePoint web interface. There are a great deal of different features, you can read about them on the Lightning Tools website - link is provided below.
As good as the Lightning Tools Data Viewer Web Part is, there are some things it does not do. For example not all data bases are supported, and my experience is that connecting several different datasources (an oracle and mssql) into a single table can be difficult. For these more complex problems you'll need to develop a business data catalog. This can be very complex if you choose to manually edit XML files, and this is where BDC MetaMan (also produced by Lighting Tools) comes in. This application takes the brain damage out of implementing a business data catalog in your SharePoint environment.
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