Integrating Visio and SharePoint

Visio 2003 is another of the Office 2003 applications that provides the Shared Workspace option under the Tools menu. This allows the Visio user to easily create a SharePoint workspace that can include other employees who need to access the information and other related documents, discussions, or links. The Track Markup feature allows tracking of changes made to the document, once again making it easier to see the modifications made to the different versions of the document. Visio now supports the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, which is becoming a new standard format. XML web services are also supported.

Visio 2003 offers some other enhancements that allow it to be used effectively with other Office 2003 products. For example, the Visio viewer allows viewing of Visio diagrams that have been pasted into other Office 2003 documents. Also, Visio 2003 comes with enhanced diagram creation tools and shapes. Two useful additions are the ability to import Calendar information from Outlook and create Gantt charts that can import from Project or Excel.

After a Visio document is ready for sharing with the team, it can be saved to a SharePoint 2003 library in a variety of formats, including *.vsd and graphics formats, as well as published to a SharePoint document library. Figure 10.7 shows the results of saving a Visio 2003 document to a web page and then opening it from the SharePoint 2003 document library.

Figure 10.7. Visio document saved as web page.

The Pan and Zoom pane on the left-hand side allows viewers to zoom in or out, making the Visio diagram much easier to navigate. This becomes important with detailed drawings, or when other files, such as AutoCAD files, have been imported into Visio. The left-hand pane also provides a Go to Page drop-down menu, for multipage documents, and a Details area accessed by holding down Ctrl and clicking on the shape. Finally, a Search Pages field is available, which enables searching for textual information. This would be useful for complex or multipage Visio documents.

TIP

When creating a Visio document, you can add hyperlinks to objects. These hyperlinks will still be active after the Visio diagram has been saved to a web page. To do so, select the object and then choose Insert, Hyperlinks from the menu. Enter the appropriate address, subaddress, and description information, and click OK. Then save the diagram as a web page and test the functionality. A great use of this is for an organizational chart, where each named object (such as Bob Jones) is linked to the individual's personal site. Alternately, a high-level map of the portal site could be created, where each object that represents an area, top-level site, or subsite is mapped to that URL.