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...

Earlier this morning, Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division formally kicked off the launch of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010. The virtual launch event showed off a bunch of demos, customer testimonials, and interviews with Microsoft product managers. You can still see the virtual launch events over at http://www.the2010event.com . Visio 2010 and the rest of the Office products are now available to all of our business customers, and we’re...

Along with the Visio 2010 Release to Manufacturing , we are also pleased to announce that the Visio 2010 SDK and Visio 2010 Viewer are now available for download. The Microsoft Visio 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains developer documentation, sample applications, and other tools to help developers create custom solutions for Visio 2010. Since the release of the Visio Beta SDK , we have made a number of improvements to the SDK: most notably, we have updated the documentation in the SDK and...

As mentioned in the last post, Visio 2010 has reached the Release to Manufacturing milestone. The product team has spent the last several months incorporating your feedback from the Beta and refining the product. A large community of customers, partners, and MVPs has contributed to this effort. More than 500,000 people have downloaded the Visio 2010 Beta release, and the feedback has been very positive. People have commented on the blog, sent e-mail, submitted Send-A-Smile reports, logged crash reports...