Microsoft has published a new technical article on MSDN about the Structured Diagram capabilities of Visio 2010. Structured Diagrams help you organize the contents of your diagrams using intuitive, logical relationships between shapes. These capabilities are exposed as the Containers, Lists, and Callouts features in Visio 2010. The article covers these topics: Overview of the Containers, Lists, and Callouts features from an end-user perspective Details for creating or customizing your own Structured...

The Visio team is pleased to announce the release of two new white papers which will help Visio Services administrators choose and configure the right external data authentication mechanism for their data connected diagrams. Data Authentication for Visio Services : This paper provides an overview of the advantages, drawbacks and applications of the various authentication mechanisms available to Visio Services, namely: Kerberos, Secure Store Service and the Unattended Account. The paper also walks...

In Visio 2010, we completely revamped the Visio user interface and adopted the Office Fluent UI or the “Ribbon”. With the Office Fluent UI, Visio’s extensive capabilities are organized into logical, easy to find groups that help you accomplish tasks efficiently. The breakdown of each of the core tabs in the Visio 2010 Ribbon was explained in a previous post . Although the Office Fluent UI was designed to help make the Office applications easier to work with, we realize that there...

If you’re an IT administrator managing multiple copies of Visio and Office 2010, this post explains some changes and improvements we’ve made to the deployment experience for Visio 2010. Visio 2010 deployment is a little different than Office 2010 deployment, and this article will illustrate all those differences. Volume Activation Methods There are two supported volume activation methods for Visio and Office 2010: Key Management Service (KMS) . KMS uses a host computer to establish an...

Congratulations to Spain for winning the 2010 World Cup! Now that the games are over and we’re all suffering through soccer withdrawal, here’s a recap of the world cup summarized as a Visio diagram. You can use this diagram as a reference to remember who eliminated who, and which group your team was in. You can also see some stats like who the top scorers were, and who received the most yellow cards. And as a bonus, you can view this diagram with Visio Services ! (If you don’t have...

Visio 2010 SDK Developer Documentation The Visio team is pleased to announce that the online version of the Visio 2010 SDK documentation is now available here . This documentation, which also shipped with the Visio SDK download , is intended to help developers working with the Visio APIs, ShapeSheet and XML. It contains the following Visio developer references. Automation Reference : Provides an overview of Automation in Visio. It includes information about the Visio Object Model, the Visio type...

If you’ve been reading the blog over the past few months, you’ve seen how excited our team is about Visio 2010. Today we are happy to announce that Visio 2010 (and the rest of Office 2010) is available in retail stores and online today. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Technical Preview program, downloaded the Beta, and gave us feedback through the blog or send-a-smile tool. You can get a free trial of Visio 2010 or Office 2010 and purchase them at www.office.com today! The...

The Visio Team recently released the Visio Services 2010 performance and capacity planning white paper . This white paper addresses the impact of SharePoint farm topology on Visio Services. It also explores how various service settings can affect latency and throughput . The white paper examines both typical and high stress conditions, which should help you better scale your deployments based on the number of users you need to support and their expected usage. As usual, please comment on the blog...

As part of the SharePoint SDK, the Visio team has published more documentation about creating Custom Data Providers. As you may recall, Visio drawings can connect to a variety of data sources, including Microsoft Excel files, SharePoint lists, SQL databases, and any other ODBC-compatible data source. In you want to connect to a different data source, you can create a custom data provider. With a few lines of code, your custom data provider can connect to data from a variety of data sources such as...

We enjoy seeing the innovative solutions that are implemented on the Visio platform. Now, with Visio 2010 and Visio Services , we’re starting to see some great new solutions that weren’t possible before. A good example is the Visio 2010 add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 . This add-in, which was originally released for Visio 2007, lets you generate a data-linked Visio diagram from Microsoft System Center Operations Manager . Visio’s data graphics are used to show...