Successful Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives start with process diagrams, and the new Visio can help business analysts create great-looking, professional process diagrams fast.

Visio makes it easy to build visually compelling organization charts and enhance them to meet your specific business needs. You can bring even more business insight into your diagram by showing multiple data graphics with a single shape.

Visio templates make it easy to build compelling diagrams that communicate visually. In this post, we’ll look at how to display information with data graphics. 

Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. Learn how to use the simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram.

Learn about Visio, a program designed to help you make diagrams for flowcharts, room layouts, timelines, organizational charts and a lot more. We’ll start at the key of Visio: understanding how its shapes work.

See the trailer here, or watch the full webinar by clicking "read more" below.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

• How to get shapes, either from the Visio program or by downloading them
• The difference between 1-D shapes and 2-D shapes...

Visio offers over 60 types of professional templates to build compelling diagrams, and organization charts are among most frequently created. Visio organization charts are simple and visual, but what if you want to connect them to key business indicators your organization is tracking, such as sales by region or department or budget by department, vacation status, training reports? Sometimes this information is located in another source such as Excel or  a complex database. Data-linked diagrams let you add data to Visio diagrams—no code required--and anyone in an organization can quickly create such dashboards to get better insights into data using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365.

The new Microsoft Visio, powered by interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365, provides a strong social, mobile and cloud-based infrastructure for Business Process Modeling (BPM). In addition to the newer workflows and collaboration features, it also offers several new diagram templates that support the latest industry standards, such as BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.4.

Look for us at the Gartner BPM Summit April 2-4, 2013 as we take our very compelling and well-recognized BPM story to the Washington D.C. area. Microsoft is a Platinum sponsor of the summit, and we are very excited to speak with a variety of customers, partners, analysts and press while at the event. Do join us if you can!

We've appreciated the reception of the new Visio, including the great feedback from early adopters around the ease of use improvements and the ability to work as a team on a single diagram at the same time. 

For those looking for a single place to find out information about the new Visio, please read on to learn more about the new Visio website.

The new Visio introduces a new XML-based file format, VSDX. In a previous post, we provided an overview of the new file format. One benefit of the new file format is its interoperability: it is now much easier to work with the default file format outside of Visio. In this post, we provide some tips for working with the new file format programmatically.