Many time you want to connect ShortPoint element with External LOB applications such as Oracle, External SQL Server, Salesforce, SAP and many more. Here we have few options you should use to connect to those systems using ShortPoint Connect feature.

Option 1: Connect using Business Connectivity Service

With Business Connectivity Service (BCS) you can bring data from external System into your SharePoint Environments as a list thought those data is not present in your SharePoint Database. Once connected to external system using BCS, we can perform CRUDQ operation (Create, Read, Update, Delete and Query) on external systems from SharePoint External List itself.

Here are few links you can use to configure BCS

For SharePoint 2013, 2016 and 2019

For SharePoint Online

Once you have configured BCS to bring data in External list to your SharePoint site, you can connect ShortPoint with it just like any other list:

External list connected to Azure SQL 

ShortPoint Connect to External List 

Option 2: REST API Connection

Some of the external systems provide REST API endpoints which you can consume as a connection from your ShortPoint. If they do not provide APIs or if its not following in the ShortPoint REST API Connect criterias, you need to make external REST API to be able to connect to external System.

Please be aware of following REST API Criteria:

1. The API EndPoint should not have any authentication (It will be supported soon)
2. The API should return a valid JSON output
3. The API should be accessible from your SharePoint site 

ShortPoint REST API Connection

Option 3: Connect through Power BI Design Element

If you want to present the data using visualization, you can use ShortPoint Power BI element. We have options to embed Power BI Reports, Dashboards and Tiles to your SharePoint Page.

For more information about Power BI, please have a look at Power BI Articles.

Connect to Power BI using ShortPoint

If you have any further queries about connection to External System, please feel free to contact us and we would be more than happy to help you with it.