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 isVisio 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 to anyone with a web browser. Visio Services performs data refresh and rendering on the server and delivers up-to-date diagrams in the browser. The diagram author no longer needs to repost the diagram every time the data changes, and diagram viewers no longer need the Visio client to see the diagram.

image

Beyond simply viewing the latest version of a diagram in the browser, Visio Services enables interactive dashboards or mash-ups.  You can show a Visio diagram in a web part and define interactions between the diagram and other web parts on a page.  For example, in the image above, selecting a computer shape in the diagram will display detailed information about that computer on the right side.  Additionally, choosing one of the radio buttons on the right side will select the shapes in the diagram that match that criteria.

The Visio team is showing Visio Services in depth at the SharePoint Conference this week.  Initial feedback from the conference attendees has been quite positive.  We’ll have a lot more Visio Services information to share on the blog next week, but there are other ways that Visio integrates with SharePoint 2010.  Coming up this week we look at one example.