Friday 8 October 2010

ODBC connectivity to Sharepoint 2007

We were asked about getting an ODBC connection to Sharepoint for reporting purposes (i.e. using something like Crystal Reports or even a BI tool like Business Objects) to carry out reporting.  After some research it seems that you cannot use a generic ODBC connection to access Sharepoint, you can however use Microsoft Access to link to Sharepoint Lists and then use an ODBC connection to the Access database.  This does mean that you need to have Access on the machine and it adds an extra layer so it might be a bit slower than ODBC but it does at least give a solutions.

If the link is two way then this also opens up the opportunity to create 3rd party tools to update Sharepoint, possibly via a batch job, to keep another system in sync or to enforce business rules that Sharepoint lacks the sophistication to do.

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