I have been using Visio
since it first arrived on the scene, capturing the imagination of all those who saw it and
used it. It provided a refreshingly new approach to diagramming, flowcharting and the
like, and while the basics have never changed, it has never grown boring either, as 2.25
million plus users will readily testify.
Unlike those of some programs, the upgrade paths for Visio users have been rather pleasant
ones. The product has just got better and better, not least in the pricing arena. I
don’t think there would be too many who would argue with me if I said that the add-on
templates were too expensive initially, but that’s a thing of the past, and the
present in the shape of Visio 2000 is here with us now. I somehow suspect that V2K will
have a lot less bugs than Y2K.
Four distinct
flavours
Visio 2000 comes in four distinct flavours, each one aimed at a particular set of users.
The Standard Edition is aimed at the business user who just wants to create
different types of diagrams from the numerous templates that accompany it, like
flowcharts, or room layouts and so on. Up one level is the Professional Edition.
This is for those who want to diagram their databases or networks. Perhaps you are a
software developer who wants to use the UML contained in the product to help you design
your programs. You might be a web site designer who wants a tool capable of automatically
mapping web sites, or you might wish to create data flow diagrams and then use hyperlinks
to navigate between the process details on each page. You also get all the business
templates that ship in Standard Edition. In fact, if you think that each edition is the
same as the ones below it with extras, that’s how it works.
Next up is the Technical Edition aimed at those who are into technical drawing,
although if you aren’t a CAD expert don’t worry, because creating technical
drawings and diagrams doesn’t require advanced CAD knowledge thanks to Visio’s
templates with over 4,000 shapes for you to employ. If you are a CAD expert you’ll be
delighted to know that the Technical Edition both reads and writes to DWG and DGN files. A
neat feature is the ability to bring in an existing DWG drawing as a background, and then
snap the correct shapes from Visio’s templates so that they match the ones on the
document.
If you are an electrical bod you needn’t feel left out as the Technical Edition has
templates that will let you create wiring diagrams until you are fed up with doing so.
Similarly you’ll not have a great deal of trouble sorting out your
telecommunications, lighting, or indeed any other sort of electronic plan you can think
of. Need to design the layout for your new manufacturing plant? No problem. Is Ductwork
your thing? Go on, you can tell us, you’re among friends, especially at Visio who
provide you with a set of shapes that let you create anything from single or double-line
HVAC control system layouts to basic ductwork. Floor plans, site plans, PFDs, P&IDs,
facilities plans linked to assets databases? If it’s technical and you want to draw
it, or diagram it, or flowchart it and more, Visio Technical Edition can manage it.
That all sounds wonderful, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the road ended
there, but it doesn’t. Visio Enterprise Edition rounds out the bunch, and it
can do everything the others can, and a whole load more.
Enterprise Edition
In fact one of the more tedious things you might have to do is produce a diagram of your
network infrastructure. While you’ve obviously been able to create network diagrams
using the templates included with the Professional and Technical Editions, the Enterprise
Edition not only lets you do that, but also offers to take the chore out of that task by
doing the whole thing for you. All you have to do is point the network recognition
technology at your network, tell Visio where to start, and in no time at all you’ll
be armpit-deep in network diagrams. Visio Enterprise uses SNMP (and Ping as well, if
necessary) to discover the physical devices as well as the topology of your network, and
then you decide just how you want that information presented to you, generally by
following a simple series of guided steps in one Wizard or another.
I talked earlier about Visio’s accurate representation of items, and that is just as
apparent now as it was back then. Visio Enterprise has the 18,000+ shapes in the Visio
Network Equipment library to call upon, and those shapes have been designed in conjunction
with hardware manufacturers around the world giving you port-level detail. You will be
able to just glance at a diagram and have no difficulty whatsoever recognising the machine
being looked at, for example.
You can also use any AutoCAD drawings and office designs you’ve already done to help
with your network layout, by utilising Visio Enterprise’s DWG file conversion
capability along with the Office Layout shapes. Talking of Office, Visio integrates rather
well with Microsoft’s offering, and that’s a trend set to continue for the
foreseeable future as Microsoft likes the software so much, it bought the company. Expect
even better integration within the Microsoft product range, and I can almost see network
administrators licking their lips in anticipation of what the Microsoft/Visio combination
will be able to come up with in the networking arena. I wouldn’t be at all surprised
to see a set of small applets based on the Visio drawing engine that can be used in a
stand-alone mode aimed at items like Active Directory and network layouts.
Installation
Installing Visio Enterprise 2000 was an absolute doddle, and it worked right out of the
box on my Windows 2000 systems too. It takes a while to install if you go for the whole
lot, and you should then allow a moment or two to install the contents of the separate
Visio Network Equipment (VNE) CD as there are a lot of shapes to get through if you decide
to go for the complete install option. As Visio uses the new Windows Installer technology,
anything you don’t want to put on straight away can be easily brought in later.
Visio integrates well with Microsoft Office 2000. You can edit Visio drawings from within
the Microsoft apps of course, but the latest version goes a step further enabling you to
create drawings that when embedded in a PowerPoint presentation, will automatically adopt
the colour scheme in use. You also get full VBA 6.0 within Visio 2000, a feature it
currently shares only with Microsoft Office 2000, further indication, were any needed, of
the strong ties that existed between the two companies prior to the Microsoft purchase.
There is also a degree of integration with Internet Explorer 5.0 as Visio 2000 enables you
to convert existing drawings into the Vector Markup Language (VML) format. That gives
people the ability to navigate through your drawings from the comfort of their own work
areas, using the web. There are over 18,000 shapes on the VNE CD each designed to the
highest quality. You’ll have no trouble identifying equipment recognised by Visio
when you run the Auto-Discovery and Layout feature, and then map the discovered items to
their respective library shapes. If you’re wondering how you can keep up-to-date with
new system releases, and thus new AutoShapes to represent them, Visio provides a
subscription service to the VNE, and that’ll net you an average 2,000 new shapes each
year apparently.
Improvements & new features
Improvements in the network discovery technology for Visio 2000 mean that you can now get
down to the port level in your network environment, and you’ll find that you can now
diagram Cisco VLAN and Spanning Tree environments after the updated AutoDiscovery feature
has captured the requisite data. There’s also supposed to be a Real-Time Network
Statistics add-on for Visio Enterprise, but I hadn’t seen that at the time of
writing. It should however have shipped by the time you read this. On the directory
services front, the latest Enterprise version improves on what went before, and provides a
whole heap more. You can now work pretty intimately with both Microsoft Active Directory
(AD) and Novell Directory Services (NDS) – you can see why Microsoft doesn’t
include its name as part of the acronym for Active Directory, can’t you!
Import filtering has been improved, and you can use the new Directory Navigator window to
see your directory layouts in a familiar tree-like structure, while at the same time
viewing your user groups, for example, in another familiar view (that of the
Organisational Chart). As Visio also supports LDIF, this gives you the capability to
create directory service diagrams that you can then export in a format that can be
implemented by the directory service for which you did the design.
One thing you will notice in the 2000 version of Visio, apart from the fact that
everything seems much faster and a lot easier to use, is that it has been equipped with
several new windows that leap out from the sides of the drawing area when you hover the
mouse over them. Aside from the Directory Navigator window mentioned earlier, the Pan
& Zoom View Window will be especially appreciated, as it encapsulates an entire
diagram within its confines. You simply pan around in that until you find the bit you
want, then drag a zoom area in the window, and watch as the main drawing area changes to
reflect the items you selected.
Further windows include a Document Explorer window so that you can see everything
associated with the current drawing, a Size & Position window that lets you alter the
size and position characteristics for any shape, and finally a Custom window that lets you
get at any custom properties you might have created for the current shape. Other features
include the ability to reverse engineer existing code (your own, naturally) into Unified
Modelling Language (UML). Code can come from Microsoft’s trio of programming
languages: Visual Basic, Visual C++, and new for this version, Visual J++. You can also go
the other way and generate code for those languages that you initially developed using UML
in Visio.
As you might expect, the ability to create database models, Entity Relationship (ER)
models and so on within Visio, continues within this latest version. Now, however, where
you once had to turn to VisualModeler for Object Role Model (ORM) capability, and then
import the result into Visio, this is now available from within. Legacy models will still
work, there naturally being the ability to import older ORM models as well as create new
ones.
Praise indeed
On the 19th of September, in a review of Venice (the beta codename for Visio
Enterprise 2000), I said the following: "Put simply, if Word and Excel are your knife
and fork, Visio has just become the spoon that stirs a whole bundle of elements together,
and comes up with an excellent result at the end of the day. Whether your thing is
drawing, or charting, whether you be database designer or software developer, or whether
you’re just looking for a drop-dead good flow-chart program, Visio provides you with
all you need and more." I stand by that even more now, and Microsoft obviously
believed that it really did need to add Visio to its table set. It was right, and I think
you’ll find after close examination that you’ll like the sort of meals you will
be able to eat using Visio, even if you just have
