This week Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Visio 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A limited number of invited participants can now download Visio 2010 to try it for themselves. This milestone also kicks off our coverage of Visio 2010 on the Archive of Visio Insights blog (2006-2018) blog!
Visio 2010 Overview
Visio 2010 focuses on three major areas of investment:
Ease of Use
Visio 2010 incorporates the Office Fluent User Interface and design philosophy. The improved organization and presentation of Visio’s capabilities helps you complete tasks and create better looking diagrams with greater efficiency. The Shapes Window gets a new look and new capabilities to make organizing shapes and adding them to the drawing even easier. Within the drawing window we added productivity improvements like shape insertion and automatic alignment & spacing to speed up initial diagram creation AND assist with editing and maintaining diagrams over time.
Process Management
Visio 2010 delivers a great new experience for working with process diagrams. We've redesigned our cross-functional flowcharts to be simple, scalable, and reliable. We've added new diagram types for the Business Process Modeling Notation standard and for designing SharePoint workflows, which can be configured and deployed with SharePoint Designer 2010. Sub-processes and containers break up a diagram into understandable pieces, and the Validation feature can analyze a diagram to ensure it is properly constructed. Visio integrates with SharePoint to provide a process diagram library for centralized storage of process documents.
Visio Services
Visio 2010 can take data-refreshable diagrams and publish them to SharePoint for broad distribution to anyone with a web browser. Visio Services performs data refresh and rendering on the server and delivers up-to-date diagrams in the browser. The diagram author no longer needs to repost the diagram every time the data changes, and diagram viewers no longer need the Visio client to see the diagram.
Visio 2010 application workspace
Looking ahead
Over the coming weeks and months we'll introduce Visio 2010 in depth. We will cover the features in Visio 2010 as well as discuss some of the customer input and decision making that went into the release. Whether you are an interested user, a shape designer, an IT professional, or a developer you'll find valuable information about the product.
We also look forward to your feedback on the product and your discussion on the blog. Please tell us what you think and what you want to know more about.