SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together – Part 1
Guest Author: Wictor Wilén
http://www.wictorwilen.se/
This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other.

I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. My dad was using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As with most of the gadgets and software he buys my dad needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learned the basics. I have used Visio since then, during my years in school and university and especially in my job as a developer and architect. (I have also made exact blue prints of our house, including the electrical wiring – call me crazy but I do love that product.) Visio is a great tool for technical diagrams and representations and extremely effective in drawing flowcharts and business processes.
Last summer when SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 were let out of the gates in Redmond, I saw how my two favorite products, SharePoint and Visio, finally found each other. Not only as a client integration, Visio was also a service application for SharePoint, called Visio Services. There was no longer need for an Active X control to view Visio drawings in the browser.
Visio 2010, part of the Office family, but not included in the Office suite is a diagramming, drawing and process modeling tool. The latest release of Visio includes new SharePoint integration features such as Business Process Modeling Notation and finally the Fluent user interface (aka the Ribbon and friends). Visio 2010 comes in three flavors Standard, Professional and Premium.
This series will cover most of the connection points between SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010, starting with the demo friendly workflow creation using the Visio to SharePoint Designer 2010 integration. Then I will show you how to use the Visio client and service application to provide the end users with a visual snapshot representation of a SharePoint workflow. After that we will take a look at how you can use SharePoint 2010 as an effective storage for process diagrams before looking into the BI aspects of Visio Services.
Guest Author: Wictor Wilén
http://www.wictorwilen.se/
Wictor Wilén is a SharePoint Architect at Connecta AB with more than 12 years experience in the web content management and portal industry. He has worked with consulting companies, founded and sold his own software company and saw the dawn of SharePoint back in 2001. Wictor is an active SharePoint community participant, writer, tutor, frequent speaker at local and international conferences, and author of SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action. In 2010 Wictor was awarded the SharePoint Server MVP title by Microsoft for his community contributions. He can be found online at http://www.wictorwilen.se/. Wictor is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
- SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together - Part 1
- SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together - Part 2
- SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together - Part 3
- SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together – Part 4
Wictor,
I am looking forward to your posts on Visio and SharePoint. There is a lot of interest in the market related to these two products joining forces.
Having worked closely with the business process modeling notation (BPMN) community — mainly business process analysts — who use Visio constantly, I can tell you they are excited about the new native BPMN support in Visio Premium 2010 and the new Visio Services in SharePoint 2010.
Process modeling in large organizations requires lots of collaboration between analysts, IT, line of business managers, and the process workers themselves. BPMN provides them a common language for development, documenting, and sharing that story. Visio now provides support for BPMN, but was missing the entire “collaboration” part….unless, viola: Visio Services and SharePoint. By placing Visio models in a SharePoint repository, the business analysts could now share models within SP, collaborate on their design using SP as the repository, and integrate those models using a common language (BPMN).
People’s eyes light up when they see this working. Glad you will be sharing your experiences with the community here.
Awesome Derek,
thanks for the comment and I hope you enjoy the rest of the series. There are indeed some really cool features and solutions that can be done with this combo. And there are some things that could have been better. When it comes to BPMN I had some bigger hopes, as you will see in the next post. But we can’t have it all at once…
/WW