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Friday, October 1, 2010

SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together – Part 4

Guest Author: Wictor Wilén
http://www.wictorwilen.se/

Welcome back to the fourth episode of the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better together series. Last time we finished looking at workflows by enhancing the workflow with a visual representation of the workflow process. This visualization was made by Visio Services.

Visio Services is a server side rendering engine for Visio that runs as a Service Application in SharePoint. Service Applications were introduced to SharePoint 2010 and has made it possible to build scalable and robust server side services, such as the Visio Services. Pretty much every service in SharePoint Server is represented by a service application. For instance the Managed Metadata is managed by one. Another really interesting service application is the Word Automation service – which can convert Word documents into HTML, PDF and other formats. But this series is about Visio, so let’s keep on track here…

This post will show you more of the Visio Services and less about the Visio client. I will show you how to take your Visio drawing, upload it to SharePoint and make it available to anyone to view and use – without the Visio client. So let’s get started.

Creating the Visio drawing

First of all we need something to show. Fire up the Visio client, any edition can be used, and start a new drawing. In this sample I will use the Work Flow Diagram stencil, which I really like since it has good looking shapes. Start the drawing by adding a Container object. Container objects are new to Visio 2010 and are a great way to group shapes together and the container will scale appropriately while you add or move the shapes within. You will find the Containers on the Insert tab.


In this case we will build a Visio drawing representing the production and sales pipe for a product. Add a few shapes and arrows to your container so it looks like below. I use three shapes, one representing manufacturing, one representing the current product stock and one representing the sales of our product. You can make this as advanced as you like. If your process, workflow or drawing does not fit on one page then create an additional page in the drawing and just use the Hyperlink tool in Visio to link between the pages – Visio Services can handle that!


Save, publish and view the drawing

Now that our drawing is done it is time to upload it into SharePoint. First, make sure that your SharePoint administrators correctly configured your SharePoint Web Application so that it uses the Visio Services. And if you forgot from the last part of the series – Visio Services is only available in the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint 2010.

Before uploading the drawing you need to make sure that it is available in a format that can be used by Visio Services. Just as the workflow drawings needed to be exported to a VWI file, drawings that are going to be used in Visio Services for rendering in the web browser must have the VWD format – Visio Web Drawing.


Once you have it in the VDW format, upload it into a document library on your SharePoint Server. Then create a page of your choice; publishing page, wiki page or web part page – you need a page to add a Web Part onto. The Web Part that we need is the Visio Web Access web part. This Web Part becomes available once the SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features feature is enabled on the site collection and you will find it in the Business Data category in the web part gallery. Add this Web Part to the page. When the web part is added it asks you to configure it, if you click on the Click here to open the tool pane – the tool pane will open!


In the tool pane you must select the Visio Web drawing that you uploaded. Browse to the file using the button and when you have selected the file click OK in the tool pane. The page will reload and you will, within seconds, see your Visio drawing in the web browser rendered using a Silverlight control. You can pan, zoom and even switch between the pages in your drawing. If you are no fortunate to have Silverlight then you will see a PNG image instead – it works but does not have the same quality. Also notice that you can select the shapes within the drawing. You can configure the web part to send information from the Visio drawing to other web parts using web part connections (I hope you see how powerful this is!).


Configure the drawing

The Visio Web Access web part is somewhat configurable using the tool pane. In the Web Drawing Display category in the tool pane you choose the web drawing and how it is displayed. For instance by checking the Force raster rendering will always render the Visio drawing as a PNG image instead of the Silverlight version. You can also set it to automatically refresh at specific intervals. The interface can be controlled using the check boxes in the Toolbar and User interface category – turn off the page navigation, zoom controls etc in the web part can be done here. Finally, except for the default web part properties, the interactivity such as zoom, pan, linking and selection can be disabled by checking the check boxes in the Web Drawing Interactivity category.

Summary

As you have seen it is really easy to turn a Visio diagram, work flow, schema or whatever you might have drawn in Visio into a web representation. Just make sure to upload the Visio drawing as a Visio Web Drawing (VDW) file into a document library and then add the Visio Web Access web part. In the next part of this series I’ll continue to show you how to use the Visio Services to turn a web drawing into a real business tool.

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.

View all entries in this series: SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together»
 

Please Join the Discussion

7 Responses to “SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together – Part 4”
  1. Visio Guy says:

    Nice article, Wictor!

    Just a note on editions and Visio Services.

    Visio 2010 Standard edition can open .VDW files but can’t save them. Visio 2010 Pro can read and save .VDW files, and of course Premium does everything!

    Chris (aka “Visio Guy”)

  2. Kalven says:

    Hey this is really an informative article. It really helped me understand this feature of Visio. So in order to go more in deep I found some template available at http://visiotoolbox.com/2010/business-intelligence.aspx

  3. meks says:

    Hello Sirs,

    One question, does this new functionality of Visio still have the Search functionality of Visio Save As Web Page? Wherein a user can still search for a specific shape inside the published drawing and a user friendly arrow pointer points to where that shape is located?

    It seems to me that thats the only function regarding Web Page publication of Visio 2010 not yet clearly discussed.

    Thanks so much. :)

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