I was recently demonstrating MOSS (level 200) to a customer and there was a lot of interest in the Business Data Catalogue (BDC). Without previously preparing a detailed demonstration I was asked to explain and walk them through how they could create a Search Scope against the data being indexed in the BDC.

Fortunately I had a sample BDC installed and functional and continued the now increasingly high risk demo. I stumbled around in the Search Scope settings of the Site Collection trying to create a scope with a rule that only included BDC data; however it is not possible to create a new rule from within the Site Collection scopes that use the BDC, where a Shared Scope has not been previously configured.

To create a rule that includes the BDC you must first create a Shared Scope from the Shared Service Provider search settings; depicted below. This Shared Scope can then be leveraged by rules associated to scopes created in the Site Collection Search Scopes and can also be associated to a custom tab.

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