As we get ready for next month’s launch of Visio® 2010, we’re ready to announce that Visio 2010 will be available in three different editions. This post explains the differences between the three editions (and also gives you a sneak peak of what our boxes will look like!)

Visio Standard 2010 Simplify complexity with a diverse set of intuitive and professional tools for diagramming.	Visio Professional 2010 Bring your diagrams to life with dynamic, data-driven visuals that are connected to real-time data and can be easily shared online with anyone.	Visio Premium 2010 Improve consistency and accuracy across your organization with advanced diagramming and new process management tools.

Visio 2007 users will note the introduction of the new edition, Visio Premium 2010. Visio Premium 2010 is our highest offering. If you’re using the Visio 2010 Technical Preview or the Visio 2010 Beta right now, you’re using the “Premium” edition.

Which edition is right for you?

Many of the improvements and new features we’ve added to Visio 2010 are available across all editions, but Professional and Premium contain some additional functionality:

• Visio Standard 2010 brings a brand new look with the incorporation of the Office Fluent User Interface and the redesigned Shapes Window. New features like Quick Shapes, Auto Align & Space, and easy insertion and deletion of shapes make creating and maintaining diagrams even easier. With the new containers and callouts, it’s easy to organize diagrams and make them look great. In addition to the new features that work with all diagram types, the improved cross-functional flowcharting template included in Visio Standard 2010 is designed to be simple, scalable, and reliable.
  
• Visio Professional 2010 builds on top of Visio Standard 2010’s great diagramming features by allowing you to connect your diagrams to data and to publish them to Visio Services. With Visio Services, you can view refreshable data-driven diagrams in SharePoint, even if you don’t have Visio installed. The Professional edition also includes advanced diagram templates like Detailed Network diagrams, Engineering diagrams, Wireframe diagrams, and Software and Database diagrams.
  
• Visio Premium 2010 includes all the features of Visio Professional 2010 and adds advanced process management features like new diagram templates for SharePoint workflows, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), and Six Sigma. SharePoint workflow diagrams can be exported into SharePoint Designer 2010 and further customized. The Subprocess feature allows you to break up your processes into manageable and reusable pieces. With diagram Validation, you can ensure that your diagrams are properly constructed. Visio Premium 2010 integrates with SharePoint Server 2010 to provide a process repository for centralized storage of process documents.

The main functionality differences between the three editions are summarized in the table below:

	Visio Standard 2010	Visio Professional 2010	Visio Premium 2010
Ease of Use Features Microsoft Office Fluent UI Quick Shapes and Mini Toolbar Page Auto Size Auto Align & Space Dynamic Grid Improved Cross-Functional Flowchart And too many more to list!
Visio Services and Data Features Publishing to Visio Services* Data Link functionality Data Graphics Data Graphics Legend
Advanced Diagram Templates Detailed Network Diagrams Engineering Diagrams Software and Database Diagrams Wireframe Diagram template ITIL Diagram template Website mapping and documentation diagrams Building architecture and service diagrams
Advanced Process Management Features SharePoint® Workflow Template BPMN Template Six Sigma Template Diagram Validation Subprocess Validation and Validation API

As usual, please comment on the blog if you have any questions about the differences between Visio 2010 editions.

Edited on 9/14/2010: Removed "Publish to Process Repository" from the "Advanced Process Management Features" row. This feature is available in all editions.

Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have released to manufacturing! As noted last month, Visio 2010 and the rest of the other Office 2010 products will be available to businesses worldwide on May 12^th and to consumers online and on retail shelves this June. Many thanks to everyone who provided product feedback on our blog and through our Send a Smile tool in our Visio 2010 Beta. Your feedback has helped us ensure a high quality product as well as provided us feature input for future consideration. We hope to continue hearing from you after you install our final release.

Over the last nine months, we have had an opportunity to cover the features of Visio 2010 over nearly 60 postings with information for users, shapes developers, IT professionals and developers. If you have recently started reading our blog or if you just want an easy reference to what we’ve already covered, below is a summary of the articles we’ve posted to date, organized by our main areas of investment for this release.

As always, please continue to let us know what you think or want to hear more about.

As mentioned in the last post, Visio 2010 has reached the Release to Manufacturing milestone.  The product team has spent the last several months incorporating your feedback from the Beta and refining the product.  A large community of customers, partners, and MVPs has contributed to this effort.  More than 500,000 people have downloaded the Visio 2010 Beta release, and the feedback has been very positive.  People have commented on the blog, sent e-mail, submitted Send-A-Smile reports, logged crash reports, and contacted Product Support to provide feedback on the product.

This post describes some of the more visible changes you will find between Beta and RTM.  Overall very little is different in the user interface for RTM.  The bulk of the work has been targeted at improving reliability (fixing bugs), performance, and security.

Including all 6 drawing tools on the Home tab

Quite a few people commented on the reduced set of drawing tools on the Home tab as compared with the Drawing Tools toolbar in previous releases.  Users of the Beta did not know or did not want to go to the Developer tab for the complete set of tools.  You can find all six tools on the Home tab for RTM.

Entry point to Line dialog from Line dropdown menu

At the bottom of the Fill and Shadow dropdown menus in the Home tab are commands to open a formatting dialog for more properties.  A similar command is missing for the Line dropdown menu in the Beta.  This command has been added for RTM for better consistency across the formatting features.

Changes to Save to SharePoint user interface

There are a number of small changes in the Backstage view to make saving files to SharePoint more understandable.  First the name of the tab for publishing and sharing files has changed from “Share” to “Save & Send”.  Then in the Save to SharePoint place, the option for selecting whether to publish as a Drawing (*.vsd) or Web Drawing (*.vdw) has changed from “Save Drawing As” to “File Types”.  Finally the command button has changed from “Save to SharePoint” to “Save As”.  The intent is to use familiar terms to describe the actions for saving a document.  Also “Save As” makes it clearer that the command will present the Save As dialog to confirm all the settings before saving.

Formatting overrides are preserved when pasting a shape into a themed document

If you apply formatting to a shape (e.g., fill color or pattern) and then copy it to a different page in a themed document, the formatting will be preserved as long as the theme on the destination page is the same as on the source page.

Support for context menu customization through RibbonX

RibbonX is the extensibility framework for the Office Fluent UI.  RibbonX provides customization of the Ribbon, the Backstage view, and context menus.  Visio 2010 Beta did not support context menu customization, but support has been added for RTM for most of Visio’s context menus.  More information on RibbonX extensibility in Office 2010 is available in this blog post.

Summary

These are the more visible changes for Visio 2010 RTM from the Beta.  There are many more improvements behind the scenes to make Visio 2010 a fast, secure, and reliable release.  Thank you for all the Beta feedback.  We hope you will try out the final version of Visio 2010 as it becomes available in the coming weeks.  Please continue to let us know what you think or want to hear more about.