Microsoft Visio

Welcome back to the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 Better together series for this third part. In part 2 I showed you how to use Visio 2010 to convert your business requirements into workflows that later could be used in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010 as the man in the middle. This time I’ll show you how Visio comes into play even after you have deployed your workflows and running them in your organization.

This is the second post in the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 - better together series. And it is time to really check out what this great combination have to offer, and the most obvious subject to start with is that we can now use Visio to design the workflows, which then are imported to SharePoint via SharePoint Designer 2010. So let’s get started. If you ever built workflows for previous versions of SharePoint you either used SharePoint Designer 2007 or Visual Studio 2005/2008. SharePoint Designer 2007 had a very limited workflow designer (you can’t actually call it a designer) that took quite some time to get used to and you were very limited in what to do. Visual Studio of course offered you the full set of workflow features. I’m not trying to get to deep into the actual workflow stuff here but it is important to understand how hard it was for the organizations to get their hand-drawn or Visio-drawn workflow into SharePoint. If you used SharePoint Designer to build the workflows then the most problematic situation was when you were supposed to move the workflow from you development environment to production - this was just impossible (yea, there was ways to work around it - but not for mere mortals).

This is the first post in a series about SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010 and how the two products integrate with each other. I remember when I first saw Visio many, many years ago. It was before Microsoft acquired it from Visio Corporation. It was my dad using it to make blue prints of our summer house. As most of the gadgets and software he buys he needs a helping hand, not saying he is not technical, but I tend to catch up on such stuff faster than him, so I learnt the basics. I have used Visio since then, during my years in school and university and especially in my job as a developer and architect. (I have also made exact blue prints of our house, including the electrical wiring - call me crazy but I do love that product.) Visio is a great tool for technical diagrams and representations and extremely effective in drawing flowcharts and business processes.