We’ve put together a kit with two Visio partners, Fluke Networks and Altima Technologies, that provides an auto-discovery tool and lots of manufacturer-specific network shapes. Fluke Network’s LAN MapShot is an auto-discovery tool that crawls your network and puts together 13 different kinds of network diagrams in Visio 2003. Here’s an example of a Visio diagram that LAN MapShot did for a detailed view of a single switch for printers.
Altima’s NetZoom Stencils is the largest collection of manufacturer-specific network equipment shapes. NetZoom Stencils have over 60,000 shapes from over 2,000 manufacturers. We picked of the 28,000 most popular shapes to ship in the kit, like these:
Altima has a nifty Flash demo that walks through some of the Altima stencils. These are full versions of the products, and together retail for about $800 so the Visio 2003 Resource Kit for IT Professionals is a pretty good deal at $199.
If you want to read up more on the individual products in the bundle, check out the product pages for LAN MapShot and NetZoom Stencils. The versions of the products in the Visio 2003 Resource Kit only work with Visio 2003.
For Visio users who remember VENT, this resource kit doesn’t provide the next version of the discontinued functionality in VENT. The auto-discovery in the kit is provided by an add-on built by Fluke Networks and does not integrate with or upgrade the former VENT functionality.
-- Mai-lan
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