Best Data Source For Visio?

[Matias Nino]

I am currently in the process of graphically documenting a bunch of configuration settings of network servers and applications in Visio 2003.

The problem is that every time a configuration setting or label changes, I have to open up Visio and make the change in several pages. What I would ideally like is to make the changes in one place in some database or excel file and have them automatically update the Visio file.

What are the different types of solutions I could use? For example, simplest solution, most robust solution, etc.

Visio is a great program, but I sill fail to see it's usefullness in easily maintaining document information up-to-date through data sources. But I'm new at this so maybe I'm wrong.

Thanks for any consideration,

Matias Nino
Microsoft Solutions Provider
Reston, VA

 

[Al Edlund]

Matias,
what you're asking is the typical first steps in developing a software
solutions. I've been working on a piece of demo code that looks at some of
this. The platform for data that I chose was MS Access for data archive.
There were a couple of reasons. The biggest was when I started to
investigate the 'custom property' set of parameters that came 'standard'
with the previous software (V2002/vent) there were almost seventy different
datapoints to be 'possibly' tracked spread across six groups (asset,
equipment, maintenance/financials, media, network, and workstation). This
made it a fairly easy push for a relational database with report generation
capabilities.
I also had the requirement for Excel Bill of Material, Powerpoint
presentation, and MS Word detail reports. Some (but not all) of this is
available at MSDN.MICROSOFT.COM in there netconfig demo (under articles in
visio 2000). So part of it had already been created.

Since both tools may/may not be active on the same system at the same time
there are exposures in data integrity (i.e. update in one software
independent of the other) so you
have to have a plan for dealing with that. I put 'datemodified' tags in both
places and will
eventually have to write a front end form for access to semi-guarantee that
it is updated
when a record is changed. So don't forget the create/update/delete processes
that will
be required.

You can always investigate M$ SMS....

Al

I am currently in the process of graphically documenting a bunch of

configuration settings of network servers and applications in Visio 2003.

The problem is that every time a configuration setting or label changes, I

have to open up Visio and make the change in several pages. What I would
ideally like is to make the changes in one place in some database or excel
file and have them automatically update the Visio file.

What are the different types of solutions I could use? For example,

simplest solution, most robust solution, etc.

Visio is a great program, but I sill fail to see it's usefullness in

easily maintaining document information up-to-date through data sources. But
I'm new at this so maybe I'm wrong.

 

[Matias Nino]

Thanks, Al. All good points.