Mai-lan's Visio Blog

Microsoft Visio Conference in January 2006

mailant — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:05:00 GMT

Microsoft is hosting a Visio conference from January 19-20, 2006 in Seattle. It's downtown by the water in the Seattle Waterfront Marriott. The show is 70% sold out already, so if you're interested, snag tickets now. Steve Ballmer is the keynote speaker. If you haven't seen him talk live yet, it's a lot of fun. SteveB has a way of telling it as it is, while keeping a sense of humour. The conference is right after the Microsoft Project conference, which is also in Seattle from January 17 to January 19th. (It's a separate conference, though, so you can't double-dip on the tickets.)

The Seattle conference covers some interesting ground, focusing mainly on Visio 2003 use and extensibility. Lots of good focus on partners who are actually using Visio in solutions, in addition to Visio product team members talking about specific functionality. It'll also give participants a sneak peak at the GREAT new features for Visio 12, the next release. I hear that you'll get the Beta 1 bits for the next release of Visio -- Beta 1 is only being distributed to a select group of folks.

Check out http://www.msvisioconference.com/ if you are interested in attending. While you're in town for the Visio conference, here's some links to my favorite places to eat down in that area.

Matt's In The Market: Excellent food and wine list in a cozy atmosphere. Lunch's catfish sandwich is great.
Macrina Bakery: Best baked goods and desserts in town.
Typhoon: Decent Thai downtown although I think Thai Tom, a little place in the U District with a long wait, is better.
Capital Club: Good drinks and decent food.

Thanks,

Mai-lan

Interesting Process Modeling Tool

mailant — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:10:00 GMT

Readers have asked me for examples of other tools that use Visio for business process analysis. One particularly nice example is IT Pearls, which has a Visio 2003 add-in called Process Modeler for Visio. It includes a set of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) shapes, an enhanced custom properties, validation, and export to BPEL format. You can load a trial version and request a product key to give it a spin: http://www.itp-commerce.com/index.php?pageid=B_011_1&lang=en.

Mai-lan

Saving Visio Diagrams as Metafiles Within Word Documents

mailant — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:15:00 GMT

One of the most common questions that I get involves how to paste Visio diagrams into Word without bloating the diagram size. When you cut and paste a Visio diagram into another Office diagram, you are putting an OLE object in your document. Because you are running the Visio process within the Office document, your Office document is going to get considerably bigger. The benefit of using OLE embedded objects lie in the ability for the user to edit the Visio drawing in the Office document.

If you don't care about editing your diagram in the document, I'd strongly suggest you use Paste Special to transform the Visio diagram into a nice, small metafile for your document. Here's how it works:

1. Copy all or select and copy part of your diagram
2. In Word, go to the Edit menu. Right below the Paste entry is Paste Special. Click Paste Special.
3. Select whatever format (other than Visio diagram) that you want to convert your diagram into.

Your Visio diagram will be converted on the spot into a metafile in your Word document. You get your visuals without bloating your document.

Mai-lan

Japanese Visio blog

mailant — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:42:00 GMT

Makoto writes a great Visio blog in Japanese. He knows a ton about Visio. I don't read Japanese but I drop by occasionally to check out the screenshots. It's interesting to see the diagrams in the Japanese market.

http://blogs.msdn.com/visioj

Visio shortcuts mousepad

mailant — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:15:00 GMT

Dan Brown has put together a neat little Visio accessory -- a Visio reference mousepad with the keyboard shortcuts, some of which I blogged about last year, and other useful reference info.

Check it out! http://www.cafepress.com/greenonions.20098068

Mai-lan

Dev Luv: Visio Drawing Control In VS 2005 Beta 2

mailant — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 08:38:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 has a bug that breaks debugging for WinForm applications that host the Visio 2003 Drawing Control. The problem is caused by the new VSHost process (more information can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/dtemp/archive/2004/08/17/215764.aspx). It is not possible to disable this hosting process in Whidbey Beta 1; however Beta 2 provides the option to turn it off.

Before you debug a project that hosts the Visio Drawing Control, go into the project’s settings, select the Debug tab, and de-select “Enable the Visual Studio hosting process.” Here's a screenshot for the setting.

Once you do that, you should be able to use the Visio drawing control in your VS 2005 winform.

-- Mai-lan

BPMN stencils for Visio

mailant — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:17:00 GMT

Visio does not natively support BPEL or BPMN, which are both commonly used in business process management applications. BPMN stands for "Business Process Modeling Notation" and is a proposed standardization for graphical notation for enterprise processes. The BPMN working community has come up with their own Visio stencils to use to create diagrams with BPMN 1.0 shapes: http://www.workflow-research.de/downloads/bpmn/

I haven't heard of anyone else in the BPEL community who has done a Visio template. If you have, feel free to post a comment.

--- Mai-lan

Visio Use at Microsoft: Vaca Bubble Chart for Revenue Reporting

mailant — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:35:00 GMT

Visio lets people communicate business information in a variety of innovative ways. One example is in use by the Visio team for revenue reporting. The Visio product management team built a dynamic bubble chart diagram to report on Visio sales by national and international subsidiary to Visio senior management.

Product management gets the latest sales data by subsidiary in Excel and uses Excel charts to demonstrate trends, like where current revenue falls along annual projections. One of our product managers, Rodrigo, wanted to graphically display how the various subsidiaries performed along an axis of growth % and revenue %. He also wanted to display customer satisfaction % and the $ value of revenue. Doing all this in an Excel chart for multiple subs resulted in a pretty confusing chart. Rodrigo wanted to use a bubble chart, which conveyed all the different dimensions and measures more clearly. Here’s the diagram Rodrigo wanted to create (all data is fictitious).

This diagram shows that the WA sub has strong growth and revenue, while the CA sub has negative growth with average revenue. Both WA and CA have the same revenue $ range, as indicated by the size of the bubble itself. The color coding indicates the fourth metric, which is a greater than 55 customer satisfaction %.

Note the stencil on the left contains the custom shapes used by the solution. Really, the bubble size and the bubble color shapes are legend shapes that describe the information on the diagram. The Axis shape helps define the location. The individual bubble shape gets used multiple times as it represents a subsidiary. This bubble chart, which we call the “Vaca Bubble Chart” after the Product Manager who created it, gets rolled out with every business review meeting with Visio senior management.

To generate the bubble chart to use for reports, the product manager goes into Visio and selects a custom diagram type that is installed as part of the Vaca Bubble Chart solution.

When the user clicks the Vaca Bubble Chart option, the solution asks the user to import data from Excel, and uses the standard Excel dialogs through the Excel API.

In this example, the data looks something like this (the numbers are made up and not reflective of anything):

To build the diagram, the solution uses the data to determine the size, text, location, and color of the bubble representing the sub. The values in Region column are used for Shape Text. The values in the Revenue $ column determine the size of the bubble shape itself. Sales Target and Growth percentage columns are used to determine the shapes’ PIN (X,Y) co-ordinates. The bubble’s color depends on the Customer Satisfaction column.

If the data changes, you can re-run the solution to get a diagram like this:

Pretty neat, huh? As I mentioned, our Product Management team uses this report for every revenue reporting meeting with senior management. Chris Castillo, who wrote the solution, is going to talk about the code that drives the diagram creation – I’ll post a link when his blog entry is up.

-- Mai-lan

Dev Luv: Editing Visio Masters

mailant — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 14:57:00 GMT

The shapes that you see on the stencil on the left pane of Visio are called “masters.” Think of a master as an object. When you drag a master from the stencil, you are dropping an instance of that master object onto the page. That instance, which we call a Visio shape, inherits its geometry and behaviors from its master.

Right-click on a shape in a Visio stencil and you’ll see lots of grayed options in the right-click menu. The stencil is read-only, which means you can’t modify the masters. Right-click on the title bar of any stencil, though, and you can save the stencil under another name, which turns the document read/write. You can then right-click on the master and choose Edit Master to modify the geometry and/of behaviors. When you do that, you get a dialog that tells you that in order to save the changes to the master, you need to close the window and save the drawing. This behavior demonstrates something that you need to know about masters if you plan to programmatically update them: masters follow a commit model. If you don’t work with the master commit model, you may get unexpected behavior when programmatically modifying masters.

You can modify a master using the Master.Open method. The Open method opens a copy of the master. (Once you’re done working with this copy, make sure to explicitly release it in non-VB programs.) Once you make changes to the master copy, you need to call the Master.Close method to commit the changes to the master object. If Master.Close is called on a master that hasn’t specifically been opened using the Master.Open method, the Close method fails. If the Close method succeeds, the changes that you made to the master copy get merged back into the master object and all instances of that Master in your code are updated with the changes.

This is an important concept when working with masters because it can be hard to figure out why your changes to masters aren’t sticking. Any changes to cells and shapes for masters need to be made using Master.Open and Master.Close to persist the changes to your master object and its instances.

-- Mai-lan

Office 2003 SP1 Whitepaper (Includes Visio 2003 SP1 Details)

mailant — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:00:00 GMT

I’ve posted a whitepaper from the Office Supportability Group that details what is in Office SP1, which everyone should install if you are using any Office 2003 application.

SP1 is available as separate downloadable patches for OneNote, MUIs, Project Client and Server, WSS, SPS and Visio. Visio’s SP1 download is located here; if you don’t have it, install it. The Visio SP has some important printing and org chart solution fixes, among other updates.

The main Office 2003 SP1 patch, available here, includes security updates for FrontPage, OWC, Publisher and the other core Office applications.

This is a level 300 document and has some good tips and tricks on patch deployment. It also provides insight on the advantages of using the Local Install Source (LIS) for patch management. This whitepaper will eventually get posted to the Office Resource Kit web site, but you can check it out now if you are trying to decide whether or not to upgrade.

-- Mai-lan

Dev Luv: Hotfix for Control Developers

mailant — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:21:00 GMT

If you're developing on the Visio 2003 ActiveX control, please install this hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;884592

It fixes a nasty page fault problem in the control. Developers and end users of the control solutions should install this hotfix.

Thanks,

Mai-lan

Dev Luv: Webcast on Programming Visio

mailant — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 21:08:00 GMT

I’m doing a webcast tomorrow called “Programming the Visio Development Platform” if you want to check it out. You can register for it at: http://www.microsoft.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&Params=%7eCMTYDataSvcParams%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ID%22+Value%3d%221032269605%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22ProviderID%22+Value%3d%22A6B43178-497C-4225-BA42-DF595171F04C%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22lang%22+Value%3d%22en%22%2f%5e%7earg+Name%3d%22cr%22+Value%3d%22US%22%2f%5e%7esParams%5e%7e%2fsParams%5e%7e%2fCMTYDataSvcParams%5e

The webcast starts on Friday, March 04, 2005, 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada). If you miss it, the recording will be available in 24 hours after the webcast at www.microsoft.com/webcasts.

I’ve got a big deadline next week so I’m a bit behind on email. If you’ve sent me questions in the last two weeks, I haven’t forgotten you!

Thanks,

Mai-lan

Visio Integration With MS Products: Graphical “Strategy Maps” for Balanced Scorecard

mailant — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:20:00 GMT

There is a whole methodology called “Balanced Scorecard” which focuses on providing access to metrics on quality, customer satisfaction, and other key business categories for success. Balanced Scorecard hinges on the axiom that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.” The strategy map is an important part of communicating and tracking the organization goals. This graphical balanced scorecard strategy map, (built in Visio, natch), is a real-live example of a balanced scorecard that is in use by CalState San Marcos’ Financial and Administrative Services. Microsoft shipped a Balanced Scorecard Framework that makes it easier to build individual point solutions for industries. Microsoft also shipped Microsoft Business Office Scorecard Accelerators that have been certified by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative.

The Microsoft Business Office Scorecard Accelerator uses Visio in its “Strategy Map Builder” which creates a visual representation of a strategy. From within the Scorecard Development Environment, the strategy map creator uses the Visio 2003 ActiveX control wrapped in a SharePoint Web part to create a strategy map that graphically represents the relationships among scorecard elements. If you're working with a scorecard created in Scorecard Builder, Business Scorecards can generate the strategy map as a Visio diagram in the control from the scorecard automatically. As an alternative, you can build the scorecard within the Visio Strategy Map Builder module, adding elements created in Scorecard Elements or creating new elements directly. The Accelerator also wraps the Visio Viewer as a SharePoint web part to view the graphical representation of the strategy map.

-- Mai-lan

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Visio Integration with MS Products: Export Topology to Visio From MOM Server

mailant — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:45:00 GMT

The customer base for the Microsoft Operations Server (MOM) overlaps pretty significantly with Visio’s customer base. Most of the IT professional desktops that use MOM have Visio installed for network diagramming, database modeling, and process diagrams. (The MOM team looked at using the Visio ActiveX drawing control in this release but couldn’t use it because, among other reasons, MMC doesn’t like using an ActiveX control as a plug-in.) MOM did implement an export feature where the topology diagrams that the server creates can be saved out to Visio files. They wrote a straight-up XSLT mapping from their XML file format to the XML Visio file format to create the drawing, which can be opened up in Visio and annotated.

-- Mai-lan

Dev Luv: Visio --> SVG --> XAML

mailant — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 07:33:00 GMT

I’ve gotten some questions about Visio’s ability to import or export XAML-based graphics files. Visio can’t do this today but you can use Visio 2003’s SVG functionality to achieve the same goal. You can save a Visio diagram out as SVG and then use a SVG to XAML converter to convert the Visio-generated SVG to XAML. I haven’t tried any of the converters myself and the XAML guys would probably be the ones to check to see which are the best. If the converters don’t work out, you can also write an XSLT for SVG to XAML yourself (although I'd be surprised if some enterprising developer hasn't already done it first).

-- Mai-lan