Visio Services

Visio Services, a feature of SharePoint Server 2010, provides some access to Visio diagrams via a user’s Web browser. Similar to the SharePoint Server Excel Services component, Visio Services supports diagram and data viewing: browser users cannot draw diagrams, but they are able to view and refresh diagrams that include data drawn from data sources. For example, an organization might publish a diagram that shows the status of servers in a data center; administrators could view the diagram in a browser and periodically refresh it to see current status.

Shown here is a typical process for using Visio Services. An author creates a diagram in Visio 2010 with links to a data source, such as Excel or a SQL database, and then saves the result as a Visio Graphics Service file (VDW). The file is uploaded to a SharePoint server. When a user requests the diagram from SharePoint, Visio Services updates the data from the original data source and displays the refreshed diagram in the browser as a JPEG or Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image or via Silverlight XAML markup.