Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Howard M Crow, Iii

Arshish C Kapadia

Jonathan Campbell

Todd Haugen

Peter Kenneth Harwood

Mohammed Nazeeruddin

Jonah Sarbin Burke

Eray Chou

Christopher Foster Johnson

R Daniel Parke

A computing device includes instructions that, when executed by a processing unit, cause the processing unit to: create a business data catalog module that accesses and manipulates data residing on an internal data store and an external data store, wherein the business data catalog module receives a request for data, determines whether the data resides in the internal data store or the external data store, and access the data residing on the external data store, and create a external data provisioning module that provisions data accessed from the external data store, wherein the external data provisioning module maps external data from the external data store for presentation on a client computing device. A user can access and manipulate the data from the external data store in a same manner as accessing and manipulating data from the internal data store.

Extending collaboration capabilities to external data

A system facilitates the search engine to search for pieces of information in various databases and application documents without the need to know the specific protocols to communicate with the various databases and application documents, such as Microsoft Excel documents. Despite the multitude of possible protocols which a crawler would have to use to connect to the databases, the system includes a unifying application programming interface to unify the way to access pieces of information in the databases and application documents.

Crawling databases for information

Growing community of inventors

Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Howard M Crow, Iii