With this post I'm trying out something new: I'll be posting some videos to give you a little bit of a better flavor of some of the features in Visio.

One of the Visio 2007 features that is most compelling visually is AutoConnect. Here is the basic description of what I'm doing in the video:

• Drop a server shape normally from the stencil.
• Use the AutoConnect blue arrows to quickly connect up two more shapes to that server.
• Drag an email server shape onto the blue arrow pointing up, connecting it up as well.
• Drag out a File Server shape and drop it on the page. Then, I use the blue arrow that points at it to connect it up. This is designed to work with shapes that are already on the page.

Leaving aside the fact that the topology I built doesn't make much sense, this should give you a sense of how the feature works. Because of how I recorded it, some of the nice live dynamics that the feature has are not shown off to full effect.

If the embedded video doesn't work for you, you can grab it directly from here. If you are still having problems, let me know -- I plan to do this for a few more features in the future.