Catalog items in Sharepoint

Question

As a feed from external system we get a Catalog items (They are product info) as part of feed once a day. We need to take this feed and store in Sharepoint. Following are things we want to achive with this.

1. Need to search those items and show as part of standard search resutls.
2. There will be Insert (New Items) , updates and deletes to the items. In addtion to that catalog item will have metadata associated with it.
3. We would not be modifing any of that data in our system. it is just the display only.

I would like to know from the group what is the best way to store this in sharepoint and search on them.

Answer 1

Give BDC (Business Data Catalog) a try. MOSS required.

Answer 2

If you don't have MOSS Enterprise, creating your own TimerJob that imports the Catalog info from this once a day into a list is also an option.

Answer 3

I would agree with the suggestion of a timer job to do a perhaps nightly batch import and update of the sharepoint catalog. The catalog would be stored in a sharepoint list using a content type (set of fields) that you specify which will hold all the product related data for the catalog.

The BDC may well be your answer if it's compatible with the type of data you want to display and would be the easier cleaner option. However if it doesn't meet all your requirements, the above solution would be the most flexible route.