Best way to get external data to SP 2010

Question

This is the scenatio:

I have an AD that i'm going to use when installing SP 2010 but it doesn't have a lot of meta data as in poperties its only got : Lastname, fistname and email etc.. So i would like to import the employee list from sql server.

I would like SharePoint to know about the data as i would be able to use it in the future for lists etc.. Some options here

1. My first option is to use Visual webpart to display the data
2. Or even use Dataview Webpart -Sharepoint Designer
3. But there is also BCS which i can import the data to SQl but the thing is i won't be really doing any update so it won't be really beneficial unless there are advantages i don't know about and thats why i'm posting this question
4. Since also i won't be having much content from AD i'm thinking of importing it into user profile and then using the data as an employee list.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can map User Profile properties to BCS connections as long as there is a unique identifier on your SQL data that can map to a unique property in the User Profile. Here is a blog post that can walk you through it:

http://www.kowalski.ms/2010/07/20/sharepoint-server-2010-supplementing-user-profile-imports-using-bcs/