Save Development time and money with BDC Meta Man

The Seattle Foundation is an organization that manages high-value charitable funds for philanthropists, supports non-profit organizations, and is a driving-force for improving the overall health of the community.

Redmond Technology Partners (RedTech) is a software consulting company in Bellevue, WA, providing technology consulting, solution development, staffing, and creative services and on this occasion provided SharePoint consulting services to The Seattle Foundation.

Mike Wills (a Sr. Solutions Architect at RedTech) has the responsibility to recommend the technologies, to provide solutions, and to design the solutions. Since RedTech is known for it's SharePoint practice, many customers do approach them for SharePoint specific work. For The Seattle Foundation, Mike designed their solution using SharePoint. The Solution entailed the following:

• Web Content Management (WCM)  for managing the website content and layout

• Business Data Catalog (BDC) to show the Foundation’s grant history on publicly available pages, like the “Recent Grants” tab on “The Seattle Foundation Grantmaking Program” page

• Business Data Catalog (BDC) to display Fund and Grant History views in the secure fund holder area of the site.

• Integrate with third-party systems for user-authentication and authorization (Blackbaud NetCommunity, and Blackbaud The Raiser’s Edge).

• Integrate with another third-party system for providing the ability for fundholders to submit Grant Recommendations (FusionLabs Granted GE)

The most important use of SharePoint at The Seattle Foundation is for hosting the public site, including the secured fundholder account area. The Seattle Foundation also uses SharePoint internally for project collaboration. RedTech uses SharePoint for their public site, and uses SharePoint extensively for team and project collaboration. As a consulting company, theyuse much of SharePoint capabilities for customer solutions, including:

• Publishing
• Collaboration
• Business Intelligence
• Document Management

The goal of The Seattle Foundation’s new website was to reach a new audience of potential donors, that is, younger, web-savvy, potential fund holders, and to make their years of research and insight regarding the Seattle area’s community needs and non-profit organizations available to the public. The Seattle Foundation’s press release regarding the website launch expounds on what they hoped to achieve. The press release was available in these two newspaper articles :The Seattle Times and The New York Times.

Before Redtechh used BDC Meta Man Professional for the solutions, They had used “BDC Definition Editor” from the MS SDK. They preferred BDC Meta Man because it helped make the BDC definition more understandable, and accelerated the creation of BDC application definitions. It went beyond enforcing proper schema of the XML files. Additionally, they needed more than two entities which was a limitation in the free version of the product at the time, and they were considering Web Service data sources as well.

By exposing data using the Business Data Catalog with BDC Meta Man, Mike was hoping to reduce the cost and effort needed for developing the new website. It reduced the amount of code required, by replacing would-be custom .NET web parts with customized Data View Web Parts. It also changed the skills required for these components of the site, by allowing a web front-end developer to use XSL and Web Part connections to compose sophisticated data-driven web pages.

BDC Meta Man did help them to achieve these goals, by enabling a web front-end developer to do much of the detailed development required for these pages in less effort than would normally be required. It freed up our more technical resources to focus on other complexities in the site.

BDC Meta Man clearly reduced the cost of developing the site. Furthermore, by accessing self-service fund holder features on the website, users were able to access their fund information and create grants with less effort from the Foundation staff.

Mike commented "I would absolutely recommend BDC Meta Man to other organizations wanting to make use of the Business Data Catalog as it saved us a tremendous amount of time and effort."

Mike Wills
Solutions Architect
Redmond Technology Partners

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