Visio Services in SharePoint 2010

Zane Freame, Product Manager

As many of my colleagues will testify, I've had a long love affair with Visio. It started when I was at University in Melbourne over 12 years ago. I stumbled across a free student version in a local computer store and from that point forward I've been creating all my flowcharts, processes, layouts and many other diagrams in Visio. In fact, in every job I've had, I've found a new application for the product. Content and Code has been no exception. On my first day I discovered that the team were already using Visio to create quick and easy wireframes...so I then went about creating new templates and stencils/shapes to meet our wireframing needs for website development.

Visio is a brilliantly simple visual tool with advanced options for integrating with external data, but until now the missing link has been publishing to SharePoint. Several years ago Content and Code developed a Visio Viewer web part for SharePoint 2003 which enabled users to view Visio diagrams in a SharePoint page provided they had the Visio Viewer add-on installed on the machine. Although that was a great option for many companies, it was no holy grail either.

With Excel Services bringing the power of publishing spread sheets and charts to SharePoint, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft decided to do the same with Visio. Well, there's no more waiting... Visio Services is here! What's more they've packed it with great data interaction features which will blow your socks off! Trust, me if you're a visual person like me, Visio Services for SharePoint 2010 is your bag of fun and will take your Visio diagrams to the next level.

From the slides, Microsoft are proud to point out that with Visio Services for SharePoint 2010 you can:

• Share Diagrams in SharePoint
• Build Data Driven Visualisations
• Integrate with SharePoint Applications

But what does this mean?

I think the best way to explain this is with some real-life examples which most of you would have come across in the past.

• A restaurant seating plan indicating which tables are availble before you make a reservation.
• Flight seating plan to check which seats are available when you check-in online.
• Elections results on a map (e.g. votes per state/county) - picture the election TV broadcast with data presented in blue or red areas on a map with bar graphs and numbers indicating which political party is winning the election race.

These are just a few examples that are out there which you could easily reproduce in Visio Services with little or no development.

It's clear to see the benefits of visualising data in this way, and now with Visio Services we can combine data in SharePoint and other data sources with our Visio diagrams and publish them to SharePoint.

The presenters here at the SharePoint Conference had plenty of other great examples to demonstrate during the sessions I attended (factory floor plans, manufacturing cycles, hotel vacancies, insurance loss per state, ski lift status etc.) proving that the opportunity with Visio Services is only limited by your visual imagination.