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...

Previously we showed how Visio Services lets you view diagrams in the browser. By default Visio Web Drawings open in their own web page for a full screen viewing experience. Visio Services also allows Visio Web Drawings to be embedded in other SharePoint pages. Using the Visio Web Access web part you can embed either static or data-driven Visio Web Drawings in SharePoint pages adding visual flair and insights to portal pages and dashboards. By centralizing relevant information onto one page, viewers...

In our last post , we talked about Visio Services--a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that extends the reach of Visio diagrams considerably. Visio Services lets you: View diagrams in the browser even if you don’t have Visio installed Refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications In this post, we explain how to create a Visio Web Drawing ( *.VDW ) file using Visio Professional 2010 or Visio Premium 2010. The Visio Web Drawing (*.VDW) is a new Visio...

Last week at the SharePoint Conference, the Visio team unveiled Visio Services – a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that extends the reach of diagrams considerably. In a nutshell, Visio Services lets you: View diagrams in the browser without needing Visio on your machine Refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications Let’s take a look in more detail at the features behind each of these scenarios. Viewing diagrams in the browser A Visio diagram...

It’s been several months since the Technical Preview was released and we started talking about Visio 2010 on this blog. The product team has been hard at work responding to your feedback, fixing bugs and polishing the application. Next month we are scheduled to release the Visio 2010 Beta, which will be open to the public. If you haven’t had the opportunity to try Visio 2010 for yourself, this is your chance. Sometimes it’s hard to wait patiently for new software releases, so to...

We frequently speak with Visio users whose organizations need to manage collections of process diagrams. Many of these users are employing basic methods such as storing these documents on network file shares. However, these methods leave much to be desired. For instance, end users frequently ask us questions like: How can I make sure I’m always editing the most recent version of a process diagram? How can I find out about updates made to the process diagrams that interest me? Additionally,...

Yesterday Microsoft released details about SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. SharePoint 2010 is a major release, covering a tremendous array of collaboration capabilities. You can read the overview on the SharePoint team blog. A notable feature in SharePoint 2010 is Visio Services . Here is the summary of Visio Services from our original description of the Visio 2010 release: Visio 2010 can take data-refreshable diagrams and publish them to SharePoint for broad distribution...

Many of you are familiar with the work we did in Visio 2007 to make it easier to surface data that exists in your diagram in a visual form. Data graphics allow you to add refreshable data visualizations to the shapes in your diagram. See our previous posts Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Released and Customizing Data Graphics for more information. No data Data graphics! One thing users have asked us for is a way to describe the data graphics used in the diagram – a legend. Visio 2010 adds the ability...

In Visio 2007, we introduced the data graphics feature to make it possible to display data on shapes using text callouts, data bars, or icons, or by coloring the shapes based on the data. As the data changes, the data graphics update accordingly. With data graphics, Visio diagrams can be used to visualize dynamic data in powerful and succinct ways. For example, data graphics are used on these network server shapes to show their network name, operating system, and IP address as text callouts that...

For several releases Visio has enhanced the appearance of shapes in diagrams by adding isometric projections or themes with gradients and shadows. All the while, their appearance in the Shapes Window has been unchanged. The 32x32 pixel icons have been limited to 16 colors (reminiscent of the EGA color palette from 1984). Thus the Shapes Window icons have not kept pace with the visual updates on the drawing surface. Visio 2010 remedies that with a feature called Live Rendering. We briefly mentioned...