Today I installed a BCS solution to a SharePoint 2010 farm. I wanted to take the list offline. So I clicked on the SPW button in the ribbon.

As expected, SharePoint Workspace popped open, and tried to get the list. But all I got was an message, that there was an error installing the list.

The eventlog, of the client I was working on, revealed that there was an error installing the solution (And we need the solution, to get the data on our clients. BCS uses solution which are deployed to clients as click-once applications to sync data.). The error details showed something like “Solution Install Stage:PendingDownload Solution Install Error”,the EventId was 2012 and the Datasource “Business Connectivity Services”. Not really a helpful message.

So I went to the SharePoint server and took a close look at the ULS log. And voilà, there was the answer: “External lists can only be synchronized with your computer from Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 with Enterprise Client Access License features enabled. For more information, contact your system administrator.”

You need to activate enterprise features in order to use SharePoint Workspace with BCS data.

Lessen learned…

Oh. Don’t forget to switch on the Offline Synchronization feature for External Lists!