Introducing SharePoint 2010 ‘Visio Services’

Microsoft released details about SharePoint 2010 at SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas; and unveiled Visio Services – a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that extends the reach of diagrams considerably. In a nutshell, Visio Services lets you: • View diagrams in browser without needing Visio on your machine • Refresh data-driven diagrams in browser • Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications

Visio 2010 can take data-refreshable diagrams, saved to a SharePoint document library as a Visio Web Drawing (a *.VDW file) using Visio Professional 2010 or Visio Premium 2010, can publish them to SharePoint for broad distribution to anyone with a web browser. Visio Services performs data refresh and rendering on server and delivers up-to-date diagrams in browser. Diagram author no longer needs to repost diagram every time data changes, and diagram viewers no longer need Visio client to see diagram. Beyond simply viewing latest version of a diagram in browser, Visio Services enables interactive dashboards or mash-ups. You can show a Visio diagram in a web part and define interactions between diagram and other web parts on a page.