There are dozens of web services that come out of the box with SharePoint. You can connect to any of these web services, or even the ones outside your intranet, easily using SharePoint Designer. This video shows how to connect to the Lists web service and retrieve data about lists and libraries from any site in your site collection or even in a different site collection (as long you have the proper permissions).

Retrieve data from your database directly into SharePoint using the XSLT Data View web part in SharePoint Designer. It is shown how to do just that. In addition, you will learn how you can create a parent-child relationship between data from the database and data in a SharePoint list using web part connections.

XSLT List View web part is a new type of web part that lets you manipulate data in a flexible manner using SharePoint Designer. A designer can easily connect to a variety of data sources to display data as needed and also setup any required conditional formatting of data. The best part about this setup is that a member of the site who is later using this data through the browser can easily interact with the views of this data or create additional views.