Taking the BCS list offline in Sharepoint 2010

After you've created and secured your external list, SharePoint supports taking the list offline so that you can program against the cached data on the client from your external data source. BCS also offers a client-side object model to allow you to program against the cached data once you've taken it offline. in this post we'll take the external list MyCustomers that we created offline and expose the list in SharePoint Workspace.

Here are few easy steps for how to do that

1. Open the MyCustomers list external list.
2. Click the List tab on the SharePoint ribbon. Note that in the "Connect & Export" group, you have different options available to you (for example, to sync with Outlook or SharePoint Workspace) to take the external list offline.
3. Click the "Sync to SharePoint Workspace" button, and you'll be prompted to accept the Installation of a file to your local machine. Click Install to initiate the VSTO Package installation on your machine.
4. After the client-side package is installed, you will be prompted with a dialog that indicates the Office Customization was successfully installed. You can then open SharePoint Workspace to view the external list offline in SharePoint Workspace.