In this post, we’ll talk about the improvements we’ve made in Visio 2010 to make it easier to work with multi-page documents. With these changes, Visio provides more control when you copy and paste shapes between pages, as well as more efficient page tab management and navigation. Copying and pasting shapes The biggest change with copy/paste is that if you copy shapes from one page and paste them to another, the shapes will paste to exactly the same location as on the first page. In prior...

In Visio 2010, we’ve made it easier to align and space shapes to make your diagrams look neat and organized. In a previous post we covered our new layout improvements that help clean up existing diagrams. In this post, we’re going to cover how improvements in Visio’s Dynamic Grid can help you drag a single shape and more easily position it in relation to other shapes on the page. Turning On the Dynamic Grid The Dynamic Grid is turned on by default for most diagram templates. You...

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard maintained by the Object Management Group which gives businesses the ability to understand their business processes using a graphical notation and to communicate these processes in a uniform manner. The basic BPMN shapes are similar to traditional flowcharting shapes, which makes modeling in BPMN easy for new users. For advanced users, the BPMN standard contains a large number of detailed shapes—more specialized versions of the basic shapes—which...

You may recall that simplifying Process Management is one of the core areas we focused on in Visio 2010. Many Visio users build large process diagrams and a common tactic is to segment them into manageable, reusable pieces. Typically, processes are broken down into parts on different pages within the same document, or in some cases into separate documents. These subprocesses may be organized around ownership of the process, the people and groups who are related to them, or simply around the size...

Recently Mark Nelson from the Visio team sat down with Harry Miller (off-screen) to discuss some of the improvements in Visio 2010 related to process diagrams. The video includes explanations of our Process Management investments as well as demos for Cross-functional Flowchart, BPMN diagram and Validation features. The conversation is the latest in a video series titled “Visio: Drawing on Experience” posted on Microsoft TechNet. Other videos featuring some of our Visio MVPs can be found...

Visio has long been the tool of choice for documenting processes. Ever since the introduction of workflow support in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have been hearing from customers, “wouldn’t it be great to visualize SharePoint workflows in Visio like flowcharts? Wouldn’t it also be great to go from Visio business process diagrams to executable workflows on SharePoint?” In Visio Premium 2010, we have partnered with the SharePoint Designer team to bring you that...

A Beta release of the Microsoft Visio 2010 SDK is now available for download ! Due to high demand for an early version of the SDK, we have released a Beta version of the SDK with a partial set of supported features. Additional features and functionality will be available in the RTM version of the Visio SDK. There are two versions available depending on whether you are running the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Visio. It is important to install the right version of the SDK to ensure that all the SDK...

This morning Microsoft announced that the Beta versions of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010 and Microsoft Visio 2010 are now available! You can download Visio 2010 Beta here . This is a public Beta, so anyone can install and use it. Changes in the Beta Visio 2010 Beta has numerous refinements based on customer feedback from the Technical Preview. The most visible changes can be found in the Backstage View. This area has been redesigned to feel more integrated with the rest...

With the past few posts we’ve shown you how you can share your diagrams with everyone using Visio Services. In this post, we’ll talk about how IT Administrators can provision and configure Visio Services in SharePoint 2010. Visio Services is included in SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL). This post is intended to show you how to quickly get started with provisioning Visio Services, and to give you an idea of what things you should consider for configuration...

The Visio Product Team has been working for several years to design, code, test and deliver Visio 2010. It takes lots of coordination and collaboration to develop a complex software application. While there are many roles involved in the engineering process, it is the Program Managers, Developers and Testers that work together the most closely from beginning to end. Program Managers gather customer input and design the features for the release. Developers are the coders responsible for implementation...