Have a bunch of Visio diagrams floating around your IT department, showing network configurations and/or server configuration? Well – now is the time to bring those Visio diagrams to LIFE!

With SharePoint 2010 Visio Graphic Services, you can tie your Visio diagrams into backend data, and then render that diagram over the browser within a SharePoint site. This is a great way to build IT dashboards of server performance or other statuses. Notice the example below:

Now this is obviously a very generic example – but you'll notice that this SharePoint site has a Visio Web Access web part within it that is rendering a Visio diagram showing server performance. What makes this really compelling is the data within the diagram is not hard coded, but is rather pulling it out of a backend data source – in this case a SharePoint list. Keep reading to see how I went about building this dashboard…

Steps to Create a Visio Graphics Services Dashboard in SharePoint

Start with your Data Source. I just created a quick SharePoint list that contains my data. This could be a SQL table, Access database, web service, etc. In my case it would be easy to have a process that every few minutes could update this list, or you could manually update it. Whatever works best for you.

Notice I created a custom list with four columns, Server Name, CPU, Memory, and Network Util. These are just a few basic server metrics to the sake of my walkthrough. Replicate something similar:

Now that you have a data source, create a new Visio 2010 diagram. In my case I used the Enterprise Application Visio template:

Once the new diagram loads, click Link Data to Shapes:

Choose your data source location. In my case this is a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services list:

Type the URL to your SharePoint site:

And specify the SharePoint list that contains your data:

Click Finish:

After you setup the connection, you'll notice your SharePoint list data at the bottom of the diagram:

Click on a row, and Drag and Drop the row onto the diagram surface:

The next thing we need to do is customize what data we want rendered, as well as setup some charts. Right click on one of the server diagrams and choose Edit Data Graphic:

Within this Edit dialog, you can customize what fields in the SharePoint list to render, where you want them rendered (Position), as well as rendering format (chart, text, font, color, etc). In my case I changed the "Name" field to my CPU field:

Then I changed the Displayed As drop down to speedometer:

Click ok to unit test your changes. Notice it pulls the data from the SharePoint list:

To add more columns, Edit the Data Graphic again and click the New Item button. Specify the field in the SharePoint list, as well as your rendering preferences:

Notice you can also specify the data elements position around the object:

Lastly, you can add a Legend if you wish:

When you're done configuring you diagram and you're ready to publish the diagram into SharePoint, click the Blue tab:

On the Home page, click Share and then Publish to Visio Services:

Click Save As, and notice the file type is "Web Drawing" with a vdw extension. Vsd extensions won't work, so make sure you publish the web drawing format and not Visio diagram format:

First, upload that VDW file into a document library in SharePoint. Next, find a SharePoint page you want to add the Visio Graphics Services web part onto:

Once you get the web part on the page, open the tool pane and browse out to the document library you uploaded the Visio diagram into:

DONE!

Phil