harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene

BDC Meta Man Web Edition

Print | posted on Monday, January 12, 2009 1:06 PM

If you are making use of the very cool Business Data Catalog in MOSS Enterprise you are doubtless aware that the hands down best tool to accelerate your projects is BDC Meta Man from Lightning Tools.

They’ve been busy beavering away on a new tool which addresses a key problem in many projects which utilize the BDC, the requirement to be able to access the Shared Services Administration Web Site in order to fiddle about with Application Definitions and so forth. Whilst it is possible to delegate permissions to the SSP Admin site, it isn’t anywhere near granular enough, especially in enterprise deployments where the BDC offers most value.

BDC Meta Man Web Edition provides access to core BDC functionality via Site Settings within a Site Collection. Very nice, it also has lots of funky AJAX UI meaning no browser plug-ins or other nastiness are needed. It’s very cool stuff. They’ve put up a screencast and you can download the beta release right now at the link below. I’d urge you to check this out right away if you are working with the BDC. It ain’t no Mulligan.

BDC Meta Man Web Edition