Mai-lan's Visio Blog : User Blog

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

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

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

Get Better at Visio Using Free MS Online Tutorials

mailant — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 18:52:00 GMT

Do you struggle with getting your shapes just right in your Visio diagrams? Do you have limited time and interest for going through a Visio user book? Here’s an easy way to update your Visio knowledge: take free online Microsoft tutorials that introduce you to Visio. This is cool content that a lot of Visio users don’t know about, and a great way to get pointers on getting the most out of Visio. The training tutorials give you self-paced lessons and three practice sessions, with a short test at the end of each lesson (tests are not scored). You also get a nifty cheat sheet (technically called a Quick Reference Card) that you can take away from the course.

Having a basic understanding of how Visio shapes work makes it easier to understand how to tweak your shapes to make your diagram look perfect. Start with the Get to Know Visio (20-30 minutes) course and then go on to Shapes I: Introductory Basics that You Can’t Live Without (30-40 minutes). From there, you can check out any of the additional course, like Print Large Drawings and Get the Results You Want (50 minutes) and Use Visio Drawings in Prsentations, Documents, and Publications (50 minutes).

Mai-lan

Viewing Visio Files

mailant — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 23:54:00 GMT

When I gave my talk at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference, I was surprised how few folks had heard about the Visio Viewer. Visio has shipped a free viewer for the last two releases of the product. You can download a Visio Viewer for Visio 2003 and a Vsio Viewer for Visio 2002. The Visio viewers are even localized into the same languages as the Visio product (such as Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, French, etc.). You can use the Visio 2003 Viewer for Visio files created in the Visio 5, 2000, 2002, and 2003 products using IE 5.0 and later browsers. The Visio 2002 Viewer works with Visio 5, 2000, and 2002 but won’t view Visio 2003 files.

The Visio Viewers are meant to be end user applications and do not have a published API for extension.

You can’t “do” anything other than view a Visio file using the Viewer, even if the Visio client application is also installed on the computer. This is a different model than the Office XP Web Components, which operate as a viewer when Office is not installed and have edit capabilities when Office is installed. Starting with Visio 2003, Visio offers a read-only Viewer for viewing Visio files and a Visio drawing control installed as part of the Visio application for full edit capabilities. Both are ActiveX controls, but the Viewer is free and downloadable from the Web. The Visio drawing control comes with the Visio application.

The Visio Viewers are only available on the Web for download (not shipped in the Office or Visio box). The Visio 2003 Viewer can also be deployed across a corporation.

-- Mai-lan

Free 30-Day Visio 2003 Trial

mailant — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:08:00 GMT

There is a 30-day trial version of Visio 2003, if you want to check it out. Almost everything I blog about is based on Visio 2003. If you have an earlier version or have never installed Visio, you can check out the trial version of the latest and greatest Visio.

Thanks,
Mai-lan

Visio Use at Microsoft: New Product User Interface Design for Program Managers

mailant — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:28:00 GMT

Among other things, Program Managers at Microsoft design the user interface experience for the next generation of product. We work with our graphic designers determine the goals, color, font, and common design elements for screens, but in many groups PMs put together the actual screen design that get pushed through usability tests, design reviews, coding, and finally into production. Most of us don’t have a whole lot of experience in higher end graphics design applications like Photoshop. Paint is a wonderful application for many purposes but when you’re cutting and pasting, changing font, and working with gradient background, it’s slow and painful.

Many Program Managers are now using Visio to build their screen prototypes and final design. The entire Office division (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Visio, Project, Publisher, SharePoint, InfoPath, FrontPage and Visio) as well as Longhorn PMs use different Visio “toolkits”, which are Visio stencils containing shapes that represent elements of common design. No code in these toolkits – these are Visio shapes on stencils. Since this involves new product design, I can’t provide any screenshots but I can talk about why we use the Visio stencils as well as how.

Visio isn’t a full-fledged graphics designer application like Photoshop or Illustrator, which is a good thing for Program Managers who are more interested in defining and updating usable prototypes than coming up with beautiful designs (we have a designer organization for that). Program Managers are also likely to be familiar with Visio from flowcharting. Visio has several important features for putting together and updating screen prototypes:

Drag-and-drop elements: You can have individual shapes that represent common screen elements like OK buttons or the standard Passport login screen that are easy to drag from a stencil and drop onto a prototype.
Element organization: We use shapes for application frames. We can then drag a shape like an Office task pane on top of the application frame. We can add shapes like selection boxes and new text boxes. All of the elements can be reorganized using the mouse to drag shapes around. It’s easy to use standard Visio functionality to send shapes to back, group them together to move as a selection, and add/delete.
Text support: If you’re changing text or text formatting on user interface or mocking up user entries, using a text box that can be moved around or updating text on a Visio shape is quick and easy.
Layers: Visio also has layer support in case you wanted to work with multiple layers.
Hyperlinks: You can add a hyperlink to a shape without using code. This makes it easy to develop more "real" online prototypes for usability testing.

The server applications like SharePoint and Project have different shapes on their stencils than the product-specific application frame shape used by the client apps. The server stencils offer one or more standard “background” shapes that represent a page on a portal or a standard form. The user drags the portal page, which is a JPG or some other image, onto the Visio page and uses that as the application frame.

The user then selects shapes from the stencil, like drop-down lists and search textboxes to position appropriately on the application frame page or the portal page. Some examples from the Office client application stencil are a shape for progress bars, selection boxes, and hyperlink icons. Many of these shapes are based on the Windows XP stencil that Visio Professional ships.

For those of you out there who want to do their own toolkits, you’ll end up doing the following:

Create a new stencil for your application prototypes
Create a screenshot of your “background” pages to use as application frame pages or your base portal page (optional).
Either use the Windows XP shapes or create your own. The easiest way to start your own stencil with all the XP shapes is to right-click on the title of the stencil and save the stencil under a different name. You can also right-click on shapes in the stencil and copy to another read/write stencil. You can create your own shapes from scratch or modify the existing Windows XP shape by right-clicking on the shape and selecting the Edit Master option. (You can only do this on your own stencil, not directly on the read-only Windows XP stencils).

-- Mai-lan

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

Visio Use at Microsoft: Business Process Management Automation

mailant — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 21:40:00 GMT

Visio's “visualize information” mantra applies to many different customer scenarios. In the next several blog entries, I’m going to focus on several different uses of Visio within Microsoft. I’ll show screen shots where I can (e.g., I don’t have to scrub confidential data). Hold off on questions about how all of this is implemented if you can – we’re in the process of putting together a more detailed description for developers on the IT showcase on Microsoft.com.

The Field Services IT organization that supports our Microsoft Consulting Services branch has developed a smart client solution is called “Services Business Process Manangement” (SBPM) that leverages Visio Pro 2003 and SharePoint. The solution is a process documentation tool used by several services, marketing and sales orgs to document and share business processes. The app has been in production at Microsoft for several months.

The smart client portion (based on WinForms, Web Services, and the .NET Framework 1.1) uses the Visio 2003 ActiveX control within a Winform to document the process. The app has a custom set of shapes. The user drags and drops the shapes to the page. The app recognizes the shape dropped and prompts the user for more information about the type of process. Here’s what the process designer winform looks like.

Once the process is documented and automatically validated by the application, the next step is to publish the process to a SharePoint site. The relevant users are notified through SharePoint roles.

This application also lives on the extranet for consumption by partners. Partners access the Visio diagram of the process via the Visio Viewer (which doesn't require the Visio application to be installed) in the browser.

It would be great to hear if there are others out there who have done a similar corporate solution, or if there are similar scenarios that could benefit from an application like this.

-- Mai-lan

Visio Program Manager Job Opening

mailant — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 20:49:00 GMT

In the spirit of networking, can you recommend or refer anyone that you think may be qualified or have an interest in the position below? We are looking for candidates who would like to Join Microsoft's award-winning Visio Team within Office. Come join the Visio Program Management team to define how our next generation diagrams improve how customers communicate about business concepts. Help build the newest cool features that help customers use Visio to visually analyze, understand, and communicate about business and technical information. Join a team that produces a product with the incredibly high customer satisfaction rate of over 95% and see what further excellence you can provide for an engaged and active customer base.

If you know of someone who might be interested, or feel that you are qualified, please reply with a Word resume and some additional information regarding your interest in the position or any questions you may have. Please send your information directly to my staffing consultant, Molly Griffin at mollyg@microsoft.com. Molly and I will review your credentials and experience and follow up with you directly should you match our needs. We expect to narrow down our final interview list in 2-3 weeks and make our final hiring decision within 4-6 weeks.

To learn more about Visio at Microsoft, please visit http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857981033.aspx.

Thanks in advance for your help and referrals!

Position Overview:

This position will directly assist Visio in becoming a graphical front end for business information. A clear desire to own an area of major customer impact, drive for results, and passion for technology is critical. A solid understanding of customer and design issues is a must. A background in databases and/or line of business applications is a plus. Experience working for more than two years as a program manager and a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related discipline or equivalent experience is required.

-- Mai-lan

Visio for Information Architecture

mailant — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 23:00:00 GMT

Dan Brown, a blog reader, writes for Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine for information architects. His articles focus on tools and best practices for preparing information architecture deliverables. Dan has written some interesting articles on Visio recently, namely creating an annotation widget for wireframes, creating a shape that you can toggle (what we call a multi-shape), and how to represent content and data in wireframes. The site is chock-full of well-written articles, on information architecture generally and on using Visio to document information architecture specifically. Good stuff!

Mai-lan

Great Shapes for Conceptual Architecture Diagrams in Visio (Part 3)

mailant — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Jeff, a blog reader, noticed a cool Web service shape in a .NET article posted on MSDN. Here’s what the diagram looks like.

The Web services shape isn’t a Visio shape that I’ve seen before so I contacted the authors of the article here at Microsoft. After weaving through several orgs, I found Eugenio from the Platform Architecture Guidance group and Srinath (who uses Visio mind maps in his blog, good man) who told me that the Web service shapes was created in Adobe Illustrator by a designer.

There are two ways that you can use an image authored in another application in a Visio diagram:

· Import as a metafile. This takes the jpg or other file format (.png, etc.) and imports it as a metafile into a Visio document. The metafile is not a native Visio shape. It’s an object. That means you can’t get to the individual parts of the shape or diagram to modify it. To see what this looks like, open Visio, click the Insert menu and select Picture | From File. Find a jpg or other image on your machine and open it in Visio. Not terribly useful unless it’s a photograph that you want to use in your diagram.

· Export from a desktop publishing app to SVG and import SVG into Visio. SVG support in Visio 2003 lets you “leverage” custom graphics created in applications for graphic designers. You can export your image into SVG if your application supports it (SVG is fairly widely supported by design apps – for example, Adobe Illustrator supports export to SVG) and then import the SVG file into Visio. This is more useful than a metafile because Visio will give you individual Visio shapes for the parts of your diagram. There are a couple things to keep in mind. First, saving a native Visio shape with custom properties and actions in SVG means that those custom properties and actions are lost when you import it back into Visio. Second, the connectivity that you get by importing SVG into Visio is pretty basic. You won’t get Visio’s dynamic connectors, for example. You’ll get plain one-dimensional lines that might not connect the way that it looks in your desktop publishing application, depending on the image. Text might a little askew too. So after the conversion so you might have to do some tweaking to get the diagram to look exactly the way that you want. To play around with how this works, create a simple diagram in Visio and save it in SVG format (use the Save As option on the File menu and find SVG in the list of extensions). Then open the SVG file in Visio again. Visio will convert the SVG file into a Visio diagram when you re-open it. That means the shapes are now Visio shapes – you can do any of the shape operations, like rotate, or add custom properties or other behaviors on the shape.

I used SVG to get the custom Web services shape into Visio. Eugenio sent me the Adobe Illustrator SVG files and I opened them in Visio. Visio converted the SVG file and gave me a whole bunch of shapes that I can reuse. I’ve picked out some of the nicer shapes from the original Adobe Illustrator SVG image.

I’ve also posted them (with the original author’s permission) in this Visio document so you can grab them for your own use.

-- Mai-lan

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

Using Visio Diagrams in Word Documents

mailant — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 22:22:00 GMT

Geetesh Bajaj, who owns http://www.indezine.com, has a nice, quick summary of how to use Visio diagrams in Word documents in this article: http://www.indezine.com/products/visio/visioword.html.

Thanks to blog reader Alexey for the heads-up!

Thanks,
Mai-lan

Great Shapes for Conceptual Architecture Diagrams in Visio (Part 2)

mailant — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 08:58:00 GMT

Sorry that I haven’t been posting frequently since Thanksgiving -- it gets super busy around the holidays, and unfortunately, my blogging time has suffered. I can’t promise that it will get better through December, especially since I’m planning a work-free holiday around Christmas but I will resume full blogging frequency in the new year. Tonight I wanted to talk about another MSDN diagram that a blog reader liked and wanted to know how to recreate in Visio.

Take a look at this image.

Let’s look at the Smart Client and Server shapes first. To find these shapes, open the File menu, click Shapes, select Network, and then choose Computer and Monitors from the list. These shapes don’t have the same color on the monitors (obviously touched up by a designer) but apart from that the representation is pretty faithful.

If you really want to put something on the PDA screen, as in the MSDN diagram, you can ungroup the shape, select the screen and then draw or paste a bitmap that looks like a PDA application. Same technique goes for applying something on the screen of the other client machine shapes.

The Server shape is taken from the Servers stencil (open the File menu, click Shapes, select Network, and then choose Servers from the list).

The diagram reuses the database shape with a document in it. There’s a couple database shapes in Visio but the one that I like is in the Active Directory Sites and Services stencil (open the File menu, click Shapes, select Network, and then choose Active Directory Sites and Services from the list).

This one took a little work to get it to the same state as the MSDN diagram. I made the following changes:

1. Remove the default “database” shape text.

2. Changed the fill to a nice blue

3. When I changed the fill, I lost the dimensionality of the shape. I had to re-create it by hand, by taking two ellipse shapes, fitting them to the top of the database shape, and then using the Fragment operation in Visio to create a neat "top". I then set the new shape on top of the database shape.

4. I used a gradient fill of 26 on the main part of the shape and a gradient fill of 32 on the top part of the shape.

5. I made the line around the shape a weight of 9 pt.

6. I added a shadow by created a variant of a half-moon shape and moving it in back of the database.

I’ve added this custom database shape to my Visio document if you want to grab it without going through all those steps. Here’s what it looks like:

For the documents in the database, I just used the Document shape from the Enterprise Applications stencil (open the File menu, click Shapes, select Software, and then choose Enterprise Applications from the list). The MSDN document shape is nicer, but I liked the effect of the simple white document in my diagram too.

The rest of the shapes are standard Visio shapes, like text blocks and connector arrows. If you’re interested in doing the rounded corners on the rectangle boxes, that’s easy to apply. Drop the rectangle shape on the page, right-click on the shape, select Format, and then Line. In the dialog, look for the Round Corners selection and select the rounding you prefer. While you’re in the dialog, you can also fill the shape with the same colors as the MSDN diagram.

-- Mai-lan

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