SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

14

Developing and Deploying Visio Services Analytics Applications

Visio Services provides a seamless integration between Visio 2010 diagrams and SharePoint 2010. Diagrams originally created on the Visio desktop application can now be shared and viewed in the SharePoint web application. Visio has been a more widely accepted tool for Business Intelligence since Visio 2007 when the ability to bind data to Visio shapes was added. This gives users an easy-to-understand view of their data.

When publishing to SharePoint, Visio Services takes the .vsd files that are created in Visio and converts them into a new .vdw format, which is how SharePoint stores the diagrams until viewing. When a request is made for a diagram through SharePoint, Visio Services again converts the .vdw file into a Silverlight file so it can properly be viewed in a web browser. When deploying to SharePoint the developer simply saves the file as a .vdw file and then SharePoint does the rest of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, requiring little additional work by the person deploying the diagram or the person attempting to view it in SharePoint.

In Lesson 7 you learned how to configure and create the Visio Services application. You also learned how to handle different security measures that are necessary when working with Visio Services. This lesson is devoted to creating and publishing content in Visio 2010, which can then be deployed to SharePoint 2010.

Two key features of Visio Services are discussed in this ...