The sixth iteration of Visio 2000 has a great reputation to live up to. Known as the de facto diagramming tool, Visio has staked its place on the "must-haves" list of software in many organisations.
It was no great surprise that Microsoft purchased Visio last year, as it had been using the Visio platform for quite some time for demonstrations of third-party integration with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). It obviously liked what it saw, and the product fits nicely into the presentation strategy of Microsoft Office, along with Word, PowerPoint and FrontPage.
Using Visio is child`s play, especially when compared with the diagramming difficulties of PowerPoint or Word. Simply choose the type of diagram you would like to create - from a database diagram to a company strategy map - then drag and drop stencils onto your page. Flow charts and relationships are also simple to map. Drag a connector and then connect the ends as needed.
This simplicity belies the true power of the application. The stencils that you can drag onto the screen to denote anything from a network architecture to an office plan are actually intelligent objects. If, for example, you are planning your office layout with Visio, you can assign costing to certain objects like desks, chairs and cupboards. By using VBA, you can automatically work out costs and create a report within an Excel spreadsheet. Database connectors are not merely lines on a page. They also contain information about the relationships between various tables.
Visual Interdev
During the launch of Visual Interdev (when Visio was still independent and in its fifth iteration), Microsoft demonstrated a network architecture plan for sales people on remote sites. By mapping the proposed network before a prospective client, the application automatically calculated cost of equipment and cabling, and simultaneously checked stock availability back at the sales person`s organisation.
Visio 2000`s most impressive feature is no doubt its database reverse architecture capabilities. Not only does it discover the data structure, it also maps all relationships and lays it all out nicely in an easy-to-read diagram, taking much of the complexity out of database design. This process is also remarkably fast and reliable. The resultant diagram is similar to Access` relationship diagram, except it looks a lot better and is much easier to manipulate.
Reverse engineering also works on Web sites, during which Visio also checks for broken links. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not see the need to include ISAPI and CGI stencils for Web site design, although ASP is prominent. If your site is non-Microsoft-centric and you have a lot of dynamic content, then this feature will prove to be useless to you. However, mail links, scripts, Java applets and other esoteric Web structures are picked up quite reliably.
Reverse engineering
The product also includes a mapping structure for Active Directory. Reverse engineering would have been a great boon here, but is conspicuous in its absence. It will, however, help network engineers get their heads around this new monster that is gaining a great deal of popularity. I was bowled over by Microsoft`s inclusion of Novell`s NDS, and the company definitely deserves credit for including its immediate competitor`s directory in its product. The stencils even look like Novell`s NDS icons.
For alternative directories, there is also a LDAP component.
The file sizes produced by the application are remarkably small. You won`t have any problem fitting them onto a single disk, as most are under 100kb. File exports include various graphic formats, as well as backward compatibility to Visio 5. A new feature is the Vector Mark-up Language (VML) export for the Internet, allowing the posting of Visio diagrams on Web sites without the size overheads of normal graphic standards. It also allows multiple pages to be displayed on the browser, and zoom on the browser (up to 1 200%) without image degradation. When saving as VML, a raster image is also created for non-VML-compliant browsers.
Overall, this product rates very highly for its functionality and usability. I hope that the next version will include more reverse engineering features, and export capabilities to create databases, Web sites and network directory structures from the diagrams. It is an excellent business tool and its value increases with use as more and more features are discovered in the application.
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