Learn all about Visio Services in SharePoint 2010

What is Visio Services?

SharePoint 2010 has changed its way of behavior amongst services. It has opened new ways to interact with other products even outside the Microsoft suite. One of these services is called Visio Services. Visio Services enables your SharePoint 2010 environment to display and inter-act with Microsoft Visio documents.

How does it suites your business?

This means that you are able to visualize data in a completely different way. Normally if you want to show data at management level, lists and scorecards are used to display overall business data and drill-downs on different levels. Imagine that you enrich some or all of those levels with visual diagrams containing that data. That would greatly impact the way how management or departments are monitoring data. Visio Services will give you those tools to accomplish this.

As you know Microsoft Visio gives the ability to create all sorts of diagrams. Diagrams are based on shapes and can be enriched with data. Instead of placing the data inside the Visio diagram, we are now able to get data from different data sources and even from SharePoint 2010. By combining such a diagram and its data into SharePoint 2010 will give you a great and interactive view of data in a collaboration platform.

Let’s say we have an IT department monitoring worldwide the state and versions of hardware and software in their farms. Normally this would be implemented in documents stored in SharePoint or using lists in SharePoint. Now you are able to create a visual representation of your server farm(s) and present per server data next to it based on a data source. The data source can be stored in SharePoint, a known external data source as SQL Server or even in a non-Microsoft legacy system. As soon as data is updated in that data source, it is updated in the visual representation.

Another example is a visual representation of business processes. Be aware that this is not replacing a workflow. But it enhances the way of how management will see the data presented to them. A visual representation of its business processes, telling him how many orders are still open, in progress, closed or sent, containing links to scorecards giving more in-depth data, gives management a whole new experience. It becomes easier to view business data and share it with others because it is part of the collaboration platform. Many more of these examples are available. But this will give you an idea of what is possible.

The full article can be found at SDN website: http://www.sdn.nl/SDN/Artikelen/tabid/58/view/View/ArticleID/3133/Visio-Services-in-SharePoint-2010.aspx