Creating a No-Code Visio Services Dashboard Using Office 365 #spc11

By Jennifer Mason (@jennifermason) Oct 5, 2011

Yesterday at the SharePoint conference I got to attend a session on using Visio Services to build dashboards in Office 365 (#SPC289). This was one of the seven different sessions that focus on Visio during the SharePoint conference, and it focused on what all you can do with Visio Services out-of-the-box (OOTB) configurations.

When we first started the session, one of the speakers stated that this was a 101 session that was intended to stretch the limits of what you can do out of the box. The session was co-presented by Chris Hopkins and AJ Briant. Chris is a Senior Consultant with the US Services, Premier ISV team at Microsoft, and AJ is a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Visio. AJ started the session by giving an overview and Chris concluded by doing some demos.

The Business Value in Visio

Organizations turn to Visio Services for many reasons, but as discussed in this session, the primary reason for its adoption is that it is a tool that exists within the environment already and is familiar and available to most users. This is primarily because of the need to solve unique business problems without having the resources to purchase systems specific to each problem. By utilizing tools already available, organizations are able to increase their ROI of the existing product set.

Visio in Action

During the session we watched Chris build a Service Request Dashboard. This dashboard showed a diagram of servers and allowed for us to click on a server within the diagram and submit a help ticket. Whenever the server was selected, the InfoPath form on the page would be populated with the required information about the server selected. This is great because in the real world this would allow for users to be able to select items from an easily recognizable diagram or chart and then not have to manually enter information in a form. Similar things will greatly improve the accuracy of your data, as well as the overall user satisfaction in most situations.

The steps to configure this dashboard were pretty straightforward, and I have outlined them below so that you can get an idea of what you would need to do to create something similar in your environment.

Create the Diagram in Visio
Associate the Shapes in Visio to the Data Source (in our example a SharePoint list)
Save the Visio Document as a Web Drawing in our SharePoint site
Create the Dashboard Page (in our example a Web Part Page)
Create the Help Desk List and Customize the Form in InfoPath (update formatting and add a connection to submit the form using a button)
Add the Visio and InfoPath web parts to the page and use the Edit Web Part menu to connect them
Use SharePoint Designer to add the additional connections (in our example we mapped two fields to the form. The browser supports one item, so we used SPD to add the additional field in the connection).

So in seven steps we managed to build this solution. Notice that we have also used three different tools for configuration of the solution — InfoPath (customize the form), IE (creating pages and adding Web Parts) and SharePoint Designer (advanced web part connection configurations).

Making it Easy

Throughout the demos, AJ and Chris took time to point out some of the features inside of Visio that make this process easier. They discussed how in previous versions of Visio it was hard for users to get started because the tool wasn’t as intuitive as some of the other Office products. And this became a barrier to how often information workers could really push Visio to its limit.

In Visio 2010 they have really tried to address this and make Visio a tool that is friendlier and easier for information workers, the goal being to make faster and better diagrams available to everyone. Some of the features that they discussed include the items below. To help the readers who didn’t get to attend the conference, I have also added some links to pages that provide greater detail on the specific functions.