Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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It seems as though people have finally figured out that Visio is not just for network engineers and architects. Probably as an outgrowth of how Visio stencils have evolved for network documentation, an IT Toolbox website has come into existence: http://www.visiotoolbox.com.

The site provides a great overview for IT pros on how to use Visio 2007 (the Professional version) for supervising and documenting an IT environment.

A good overview of how Visio can be used to document as well as visualize your IT environment is available in the Visio in Practice tab on the web site. There is also a link in the right column for a full FAQ that goes into how Visio Pro integrates with other Office apps and SharePoint.

Figure 1436

Probably the main advantage can be gleaned from this first diagram sample; notice how the diagram objects are actually repositories of data that can be stored in an Excel spreadsheet. You can generate a spreadsheet based on object properties or actually use macros and VBA to create a diagram based on the entries in a spreadsheet.

More experienced Visio users already know how to control the properties of each object, and the page itself, with the powerful Visio ShapeSheet – which we introduced in the reference guide when we began working with Visio.

In terms of visualization, the toolbox site shows you a variety of diagrams that take advantage of Visio shapes (found in the stencils) that can create a database model, a web site map, a Rack diagram, a UML diagram or any of a number of very sophisticated diagrams that let you document an installation with great specificity.

New in Visio Pro 2007 is a template for an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) diagram that works as a framework that IT professionals use to identify best practices for their IT service management. An ITIL process is typically drawn as a flowchart. The ITIL Diagram template in Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007 provides attractive and functional shapes to create and enhance diagrams of ITIL processes.

Remember that each shape dropped into the diagram has its own custom properties which are stored in the diagram as a database, and can be used to generate a report. The actual Visio custom properties can be updated from an outside database or spreadsheet, or be used to update or populate and external database as well. This provides additional flexibility for an IT pro to use external applications like Excel or Access to form the basis for the visualization aspect of Visio, by using an underlying database to supply the custom properties for Visio shapes.

Visio 2007 has several new features for interacting with data from other sources:

Data Linking provides an easy mechanism for connecting shapes in a diagram to rows in a database table, spreadsheet, or other ODBC-compliant datasource.
Data Refresh ensures that the data in a diagram is always current.
Data Graphics bring the data to life through customizable callouts, bar charts, icon sets, and data-driven shape coloring.
As described in the toolbox, Visio also has a number of ways to distribute or communicate the important information in its diagrams to other members of IT, or throughout the enterprise:
Track Markup, which allows colleagues to review and annotate project designs.
Save As Web Page, allowing diagrams can be made available to anyone with a browser (those with the free Visio Viewer have access to even more diagram features).
With enhanced SharePoint integration.
Viewing of Visio diagrams in Outlook (new in Visio 2007) by using the preview feature in Outlook 2007.
Publishing to PDF and XPS documents formats (with the addition of a freely downloadable plug-in).
Not surprisingly the toolbox is a venue where high end Visio users, stencil developers, VBA developers and other can share their applications and make revenue.

But even if you don’t decide to purchase or you don’t need any Visio third party products or stencils, you can benefit for seeing some of the different ways that these features can be used, and have been implemented by developers or other IT users.

I believe that the real gold in the site is the Downloads and Trials tab. When I first began with Visio programming, using other peoples’ applications and deconstructing them or just seeing what the application was used for opened up my imagination to other ways to use Visio.

Here are just some of the free downloads from available Microsoft:

Financial Services Diagrams
Audit Process
Insurance Claims by State
Investment Report
Loan Consolidation Steps
Sarbanes-Oxley
Manufacturing Diagrams
Factory Floor Assembly Process
Fault Tree Analysis
PC Assembly Process
Supply Chain
Value Stream Analysis
Professional Services Diagrams
Help Desk Flow
HVAC Controls
Military Organization Chart
Network Equipment Rack
Space Planning

If you combine any of these diagrams with a bit of effort in creating a diagram for your own purposes, like moving into a new space, you will certainly see a number of significant possibilities for using Visio 2007 in your own practice.

The trials available are generally there to introduce you to the various Visio partners – probably the most famous is Visimation — who you can certainly hire or buy from but who can also serve as tremendous models for your own applications.

And if you really get excited about Visio, you may want to attend the next Visio conference in Redmond, next February 5-6.

But any way you look at it, Visio 2007 is a terrific documentation and visualization tool for IT pros, and you can get a great insight into how and why to use it at the new toolbox web site.

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